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MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 


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MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
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i 
THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 
OF 


MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 





BY yo 
ARTHUR 5S. HOYT 


Rew Pork 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


1924 


All rights reserved 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


CoPpyRIGHT, 1924, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 





Set up and printed. Published January, 1924, 


Press of 
J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 


To 
HILDEGARDE HOYT SWIFT 


AND 


ARTHUR LESSNER SWIFT, Jr. 


KEEN AND APPRECIATIVE CRITICS OF 
THEIR FATHERS WORK, THIS BOOK 
IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


Poems in this book are quoted through the courtesy 
of the following authors and publishers: 


William Vaughn Moody, 

R. H. Schauffler, 

John Drinkwater .)0/.5.0,.° Houghton, Miftlin & Co. 

William Watson, . 

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, 

John Masefield, 

wamec. Oppenheim |\.)..)..'.°. The Macmillan Co., N. Y. 

“The Sale of St. Thomas”. Abercrombie — Georgian 
Poetry Vol. I, G. P. Put- 
nam’s Sons, N. Y. & Lon- 
don 

“McAndrew’s Hymn” ...Rudyard Kipling, A. P. 
Watt & Son, London 

“The Man with the Hoe’.Edwin Markham 


Stephen Phillips ........ 

PIG ECACC G Os is)s hice 0s Rupert Brooke — Dodd, 
Mead & Co. 

MSS Rel Ce Charles Scribner's Sons 

ALMA GT Fe i a John Oxenham — Geo. H. 
Doran Co. 


“Each in his own Tongue”. W. H. Carruth 

“The City of the Dreadful 
ISTICINEY rites sels aise’ James Thomson, Thomas 
Bird Mosher 


Vii 


Vili ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. 


Lhe hres, is creas we Everard Owen — Sidgwick 
& Jackson, London 
AlfredaNoyes iis cui eeyets Frederick A. Stokes Co. 


Poems from “War Verse’.Edited by Foxcroft — 
Thomas Y. Crowell 


Johns Davidson 7m. John Lane — The Bodley 
Head, London 
“Smoke and Steel” ....... Carl Sandburg — Harcourt, 


Brace & Howe 


FOREWORD 


THIs is not a venture in literary criticism. It would 
be foolish to venture where so many great ones have 
trod. The book is just what the title suggests, the effort 
to show the relation of modern English poetry to the 
higher thought and impulse of the race. 

The author is largely indebted to others. The 
thoughts of many minds will doubtless be found in these 
pages, the result of life-long study and teaching. 

Special mention, however, should be made of such 
books as Stopford Brooke’s Tennyson and Browning, 
Sir Henry Jones and Dr. John A. Hutton on Browning, 
Henry van Dyke’s Tennyson, the Introductions to In 
Memoriam by Davidson and Genung, Miss Vida Scud- 
der’s studies in both the spiritual and social message of 
modern English Literature, and Chapman’s “English 
Literature, in Account with Religion.” 

The very idea that poetry has a message may be dis- 
tasteful to some critics. What end can there be beyond 
poetry itself? But as life is full of meaning, constant 
witness to the spirit’s striving after the Eternal, poetry 
as the most subtle and penetrative interpretation of life, 
must bring its testimony. Religion can not express it- 
self without poetry, and the noblest poetry has been 
religious. 

And no men need poetry more than the teachers of 
religion. The highest truths of religion can not be con- 
ceived without imagination, and they can not be made 

1X 


x FOREWORD 


realities to the common mind without its pictures of 
ethereal hue. Imagination first declines, and when the 
vision splendid is lost, the sermon sinks to a wearisome 
and lifeless dogma. 

And there is good thought and inspiration in the poets 
as nowhere else. Here the soul can slake its thirst and 
renew its strength. 

In an age when so many of its thinkers are marked 
by a cynical pessimism, the spiritual teacher can take 
good heart at the growing light of poetry. We shall 
not rejoice in this light, if we look too closely within 
churchly confines. The spirit of God is as broad as 
human need and human effort. 


“And not by eastern windows only, 
When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
But westward, look, the land is bright.” 


Is there to be a new day for faith? Is the growing 
knowledge to be crowned by a growing reverence and 
charity? What so prophetic as the modern poet? 
Listen to the voice of John Drinkwater who sings in the 
growing dawn 





“O heart, be ready now, 
Cold in your night, be ready now to sing— 
Dawn as it wakes the sleeping bird on bough, 
Shall summon you to instant reckoning,— 
She is your dawn, O heart,— 
Sing till the night of death shall come, the 
gospel of her light.” 


August, 1923. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 
TCP RATIViGS FORCES ice cies ire sees 


II Tue Poet oF THE HILts . 
III A Poet or DEmMocRACcY 

IV TENNYSON: THE MAN AND THE POET 

V In Memoriam: THE Way oF FAITH 
VI Brownina’s INTERPRETATION OF LOVE . 


VII BrRowninNc’s INTERPRETATION OF THE IN- 
CARNATION 


VIII MatrHew ARNOLD, THE POET OF THE 
QUESTIONING SPIRIT 


IX Poets or DousT AND DENIAL 
X PoETs oF THE DAWN . 
XI Poets ofr THE NEw Day . 


XII Tue Port AND THE PREACHER 


139 


163 
185 
211 


235 
263 


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Creative Forces 





THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE OF 
MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 


CHAPTER I 
CREATIVE FORCES 


There are two aspects or ideas of poetry, the artistic 
and prophetic. They are not often kept consciously 
distinct, but as one or the other prevails, poetry be- 
comes critical or creative. Both express a truth of 
poetry. Writing is not poetry that is devoid of in- 
vention and harmony, that has no music in its num- 
bers, no beauty in its images. “Poetry in its complete 
sympathy with beauty,” says Leigh Hunt, “must of 
necessity leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power 
over its forms unmanifested.” But in poetry as in 
every other expression of life, the form is often dwelt 
upon at the expense of the spirit. The forces of the 
soul are spent upon refining and not upon finding, and 
poetry becomes critical, polite and formal, the luxury 
of a few, a sort of “lordly pleasure-house,” and not the 
foregleam and foreword of progress, the energy of 
social and spiritual recreation. 

The lower view, and I am sorry to say the too com- 
mon view, of poetry is voiced by Pope the master of 
the critical school: “Poetry and criticism are by no 


3 


4 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


means the universal concern of the world, but only 
the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and 
of idle men who read there. All the advantages I can 
think of, accruing from a genius for poetry, are the 
agreeable power of self-amusement, when a man is 
idle or alone, the privilege of being admitted into the 
best company, and the freedom of saying as many 
careless things as other people without being so se- 
verely remarked on.” This perhaps is the lowest depth 
of the mere artistic view of poetry—pleasers of self. 

But such a view is far below the true definition of 
poetry and the conception which the great poets have 
had of their work. The prophetic view has the largest 
truth in it. We must regard the interpretative power 
of the noblest poetry, revealing and representing the 
directive and creative thoughts of men, and touching 
the profound feelings that make the impulses of human 
action. The imagination is the noblest power of vision. 
It flashes its way where reason painfully gropes. By 
its reaches the otherwise independent and unrelated 
facts of the natural world are bound into order and 
movement, and by its aid the thoughts of God are 
recorded for human eyes. The missing link has never 
been found; it is imagination that bridges the gulf and 
thinks of the universe and life as continuous creation. 
And the sensitiveness of the poet, the cords of feeling 
that vibrate to the faintest breath of life, thrill with 
the unexpressed instincts and yearnings of the heart, 
grasp relations and facts larger and truer than in com- 
mon hours, “a more ample greatness, a more exact 
goodness, a more absolute variety,” and body forth the 
dim and intangible visions that at times haunt all men. 

Every definition of poetry that is felt to be at all 
true to its deeper meaning tries to express the prophetic 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 5 


element.. “Poetry is a criticism of life.” ‘Poetry 
speaks out the thought that lies in things.” ‘Poetry 
is the presentment in musical form to the imagination 
of noble grounds for the noble emotions.” 

And the great poets themselves have often felt that 
they were voices of a higher wisdom, that “poetry hath 
some participation of divineness.” The best minds 
have always held poetry to be in some sort a revela- 
tion, and the critics are not so very wrong in some- 
times seeing more in great poems than the poets them- 
selves were conscious of writing. Milton, writing of 
the conditions under which poetry is possible, says: 
“This is not to be obtained but by devout prayer to 
that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all utterance 
and knowledge, and sends his Seraphim with the hal- 
lowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of 
whom He pleases.” Even a child of nature like Robert 
Burns felt that he was a dedicated spirit. The muse 
of Scotch poetry, the genius of native land, appears to 
him and gives him his commission: 


I saw thee seek the sounding shore, 

Delighted with the dashing roar; 

Or when the North his fleecy store 
Drove through the sky,— 

I saw grim nature’s visage hoar 
Struck thy young eye. 


Or when the deep, green-mantled earth, 
Warm cherished ev’ry flow’ret’s birth, 
And joy and music pouring forth 

In every grove— 
I saw thee eye the gen’ral mirth 

With boundless love. 


6 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


“Poet and prophet differ greatly in our loose mod- 
ern notions of them,” says Carlyle. “In some old 
languages the titles are synonymous: vates means both 
Prophet and Poet: and indeed at all times Prophet 
and Poet, well understood, have much kindred meaning. 
Fundamentally indeed they are still the same; in this 
most important respect especially, that they have pene- 
trated both of them into the sacred mystery of the 
universe. Whoever may forget this divine mystery, as 
the realized thought of God, the vates, whether Prophet 
or Poet, has penetrated into it, is a man sent hither to 
make it more impressively known to us.” 

Tennyson has clearly expressed his thought of the 
Poet’s calling— 


The Poet in a golden clime was born, 
With golden stars above; 

Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love. 


He saw through life and death, through good and ill, 
He saw through his own soul; 

The marvel of the everlasting will, 
An open scroll, 
Before him lay. 


Then truth was multiplied on truth: the world 
Like one great garden show’d, 

And through the wreaths of floating dark upcurled 
Rare sunrise flow’d. 


And freedom rear’d in that august sunrise, 
Her beautiful, bold brow, 

When rites and forms before his burning eyes 
Melted like snow. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 7 


Rare gifts of nature, the eye that reads the everlasting 
will, the apostleship of light, truth, liberty, the power 
to see the life and meaning beneath all forms,—such 
a man is verily sent of God. 

Both Robert Browning and Mrs. Browning believed 
that poetry is, in the inception, an inspiration. “The 
more one sits and thinks over the creative process,” 
says Robert Browning in the recently published letters, 
“the more it confirms itself an inspiration, nothing 
more or less.” 

I do not mean to suggest that there is no difference 
between the inspiration of the noblest poetry and that 
of the writers of the Bible. But the difference lies 
in the purpose of each more than in anything else. The 
inspiration of the Bible is to give the historic revela- 
tion of Christianity; the inspiration of the noblest 
poetry is to interpret the facts of daily experience. 
They are in some sense complement and correlate 
of each other. As the Bible has been the food for 
the loftiest imagination, as its most spiritual truths 
make their appeal through imagination and feeling,— 
cannot be understood without the poetic capacity, and 
often find their only suitable expression in the form 
of poetry itseli—; so poetry sustains the faculty of 
faith, casts over the common things of life an ideal light, 
pierces the veil of sense and reads the spiritual truths 
of man and the universe, is a witness for God and the 
spirit and immortality. It is not wrong to connect 
Mr. Darwin’s loss of interest in Christianity with his 
waning love for poetry. 

So an interpretation of the poets has its place in ie 
studies of religion. Poetry belongs to polite learning 
(though one may dislike the word “polite’),—the 
necessary culture of a mind that loves truth and 


8 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


beauty, the training of the necessary faculties of the 
spiritual life, imagination and emotion. But more 
than this: the great poets are voices to the soul. Dante 
and Goethe, Shakspere and Milton, Wordsworth and 
Tennyson and Browning are prophets of the spiritual 
life as truly as Augustine and Luther and Calvin and 
Wesley and Newman. In a recent series of studies of 
great devotional helps, “In Memoriam,” “Saul,” and 
“Rabbi Ben Ezra” were rightly put with ‘“Pilgrim’s 
Progress” and “Holy Living and Dying.” We have 


the animating faith, 
That poets even as prophets, 
Have each his own peculiar faculty, 
Heaven’s gift, a sense that fits them to perceive 
Objects unseen before. 


The Poet-Prophets are the subtle interpreters of 
their time ; they speak upon the house-top what is whis- 
pered in the ear: they voice the dim and intangible 
yearnings and visions of the many. And so they are 
not only the resultant expression of the generation, the 
word of the age-consciousness; but they mark the 
way of thought and life, become leaders, creators, of 
social and spiritual progress. But the man and his 
age are to be interpreted together. “No man,” says 
Mr. Froude, “in single contact with the facts of his 
own time, could produce a Pallas, a Madonna, a King 
Lear. Such works are the result of a nation’s spirit.” 
And to interpret aright the higher message of modern 
English poetry, we must feel the forces it voiced and 
thereby helped to their dominance. 

What in modern life has been creative? What have 
been the forces of the higher life of the last hundred 
years? They have been a new view of nature, a new 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 9 


interest in man, a new spirit as to the problems of 
being: scientific, democratic, religious. These are the 
forces that have profoundly stirred the hearts of men, 
made the last century creative, and lifted up its chosen 
souls as seers and singers. 

The strongest single force of the century has been 
the scientific movement. Many of the sciences had 
been formed before: men had been observing the phe- 
nomena of nature and these were slowly modifying 
their ideas of the universe and of man; but not until 
the nineteenth century did the scientific habit become 
the ruling spirit, and a philosophy was formed of the 
facts observed that made essentially a new view of 
nature. It is the theory of Development. No doubt 
the idea of growth, of orderly progress, was long in 
the minds of men. It was as truly in the air as the 
thought of a new world before Columbus set sail from 
Palos. There were many hints and suggestions before 
Darwin gave it strict statement in Science and Spencer 
in Philosophy. 

Miss Scudder, in “The Life of the Spirit in the 
Modern English Poets,” says that “the chief poetic 
passages which treat directly the modern evolutionary 
conception are really prophetic, written before the new 
creed was fairly spoken. There are three great modern 
passages dealing with the universe as a whole in rela- 
tion to man: the second and fourth acts of Shelley’s 
‘Prometheus Unbound,’ written in 1819; the lines in 
the last act of Browning’s ‘Paracelsus,’ written in 
1833; and parts of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam,’ pub- 

lished in 1850. ‘The Origin of Species’ was not 
- published till 1859; yet every one of these passages 
expresses a clear conception of evolution as distinct 
from the then current idea of spasmodic and special 


10 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


creations.” It may not be easy to find the truth in 
Shelley’s bewildering dream of an unconscious uni- 
verse gradually informed with conscious life and love: 
but Browning’s lines leave no doubt as to his concey). 
tion of an evolution controlled and filled by God: 


The center-fire heaves underneath the earth, 

And the earth changes like a human face. 
Thus God dwells in all, 

From life’s minute beginnings, up at last 

To man, the consummation of this scheme 

Of being, the completion of this sphere 

Of life. 


And more wonderful still is the prophecy of Tennyson 
in “In Memoriam,”—after the years of question and re- 
flection still the poetic interpretation of development. 
It is the 118th song: 


They say, 
The solid earth whereon we tread 


In tracts of fluent heat began, 
And grew to seeming-random forms, 
The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 
Till at the last arose the man; 


Who throve and branch’d from clime to clime, 
The herald of a higher race, 
And of himself in higher place, 

If so he type this work of time 


Within himself, from more to more; 
Or, crown’d with attributes of woe 
Like glories, move his course, and show 
That life is not as idle ore, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY II 


But iron dug from central gloom, 
And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipt in baths of hissing tears, 

And batter’d with the shocks of doom 


To shape and use. Arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 


But has the scientific movement enriched the thought 
of men and given poetry a new inspiration? It does 
not seem to be the first effect of scientific study; and 
it is thought by many to be materialistic rather than 
spiritual, to lessen ideality by the removal of mystery, 
to clip the wings of imagination by its reverence for 
fact and law. Wordsworth voices the fear and the 
scorn of the worldly spirit that puts us out of tune 
with the true music of nature: 


Great God! Id rather be 
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 


But Wordsworth loved truth too well to fear the un- 
veiling of science; he knew nature too well to fear 
that the study of man could do less than increase the 
wonder and divineness of being. He saw the richer 
field of imagination through the labors of men. “The 
man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown 
benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude. 
The poet, singing a song in which all human beings 


12 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our 
visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the 
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impas- 
sioned expression which is on the countenance of 
science. If the labors of the men of science should 
ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, 
in our condition, and in the impressions which we 
habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more 
than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps 
of the man of science, not only in these general indirect 
effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation 
into the midst of the objects of science itself. . .. If 
the time should ever come when what is now called 
science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put 
on as it were a form of flesh and blood, the poet will 
lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and 
will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and 
genuine inmate of the household of man.” 

The faith of Wordsworth has been richly justified 
by the results of scientific thought already. Whatever 
widens the realm of knowledge widens the realm of 
imagination. Not only has the poet stood beside the 
scientist and carried “sensation into the midst of the 
objects of science,” as already intimated, felt the truth 
after which others were painfully groping; but scien- 
tific thought has given powerful impulse to literature. 

The idea of force at the heart of things, ever at 
work changing and shaping, the dynamic of endless 
growth, has given a new interest to nature. It is not 
finished, fixed, mechanical; but a living thing with the 
endless changes of motion, and the mysterious charm 
of an ever-becoming and unfolding purpose. The 
imagination of the poets has kept them from the too 
common mistake of the scientists of making force 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 13 


impersonal, and they have felt a mighty Being awake 
and watched the ongoings of his life. So nature is 
an object of study and feeling as never before. Not 
the mere background of man’s life, but the environ- 
ment, the garden, the home, and almost the heaven. 
There is little love of nature in the older literature as 
we now know it. It is said that there is hardly a new 
symbol: of nature in the poets from Shakspere to 
Burns. But the idea of the restless and creative force 
at the heart of things has given interest to the minutest 
phases, the most transient changes of natural life. So 
a world of new imagery has been found to express the 
unfolding revelation. It is the symbolism of life, of 
changing, growing life. 


The earth changes like a human face. 


And a new feeling for nature has come in the view of 
force as growth. There is a joy in living, in feeling 
one’s self a part of this boundless life, in receiving 
the impulses of this boundless energy. Not melan- 
choly but hope is the message of the green earth and 
the rolling year. Not the passing glory, the fading 
flower, the falling leaf, but the mutability of earth,— 
as the conservation of life, the imperishableness of all 
good, one passing only to give place to a higher life. 
The idea of inner force that gives growth to natural 
things has not only given new and brighter aspects to 
nature, but has led to the view of human life as devel- 
opment. So there is a new treatment of character in 
literature. We are not so interested in external facts, 
in actions, however thrilling the story of them may 
be,—as in the inner life, the motives and passions, the 
contest within, soul at war with sense, the action of 


14 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


inherited tendencies on environment, the processes of 
soul-growth, the shaping of human destiny. The 
greatest masters of the old romance cannot hold the 
page to the novelist to-day of motive and purpose, who 
makes us conscious of the profound forces of human 
life. Jane Austen may be a greater artist than Mar- 
garet Deland, but she lives in a provincial world com- 
pared with the modern. In fact modern literature is 
the drama of the inner life. Even the poetry of 
reflection, the analysis of thought itself apart from the 
fascination of action, has a new vitality from this prin- 
ciple of growth, as you will see by comparing Arnold 
and Clough, Tennyson and Browning in their most 
subjective moods, with the dead, didactic verse of the 
eighteenth century. 

The scientific spirit has given us a universe tremu- 
lous with charm, life tragic with import. “The passion 
for development controls our writers. Ours is the 
age of the poetry of struggle, not of victory; of desire, 
not of achievement; of growth, not of rest.” 

And with this sense of growth, is a striving after 
unity, a feeling at heart that all must be connected 
with an infinite reason, and working out a single pur- 
pose which the infinite mind sees. Fragments of force, 
disconnected events, purposeless efforts, these are in- 
tolerable to the deeper thought of life. The idea of 
unity connects human life with the universe; we rise 
out of the lower life and are now strangely connected 
with it. Underneath our feet are cosmic fires, across 
our sky sweep cosmic winds, and within our very 
being are moving forces connecting us with the very 
beginnings of life, and suggesting their prophecy of 
what we may be. 

We are bound up with human lives everywhere. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 15 


The larger, truer man is ever before our eyes. The 
problem of the individual is the problem of society. 

The sense of the larger unity of life brought by the 
scientific movement manifests itself in the spirit of 
literature and in the details of its work. Every work 
must have a worthy reason for being. Even our non- 
sense must have logic and purpose. Many strange and 
popular conceits of the older writers are simply stupid 
to the modern mind. You can hardly conceive of a 
gifted mind to-day spending its art upon a theme with- 
out dignity or lofty aspiration, like Pope’s “Rape of 
the Lock.” 

There is a passion for fact, the facts of the outer 
and the inner world. The impossible is ruled out. Of 
course the danger of this scientific spirit in literature 
is in the lower realism, the photographic view of life, 
picturing just what we see. The difference here will 
depend upon the organ of vision. It may see with 
the eyes of a Zola or.an Ian Maclaren. But even 
Zola is not all flesh: he can read the soul in the con- 
demned Dreyfus, and show his own soul in the heroic 
plea for the wronged. The fact is the truest idealism 
rises from the realistic basis, and this the scientific 
spirit has brought into literature. Men and women 
are better than gnomes and ghosts and impossible 
knights-errant. 

There is a marvelous feeling for detail in modern 
verse, that comes from this passion for fact, this 
desire for reality, the sense of the worth because the 
vital relation of every fact of life. So on every hand 
are new subjects for poetry, a vastly widened field, as 
wide as the realms of modern thought, and made fit 
subjects for poetry, lifted into the realm of the imag- 
ination, by the great principles of life, its growth and 


16 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


unity. Poetry lends its divine inspiration to give this 
great body of facts the semblance of flesh and blood, 
to infuse into it the breath of life. 

A second influence that has mightily touched modern 
English poetry, found voice in its best pages, and in 
turn gained its noblest impulse from the poets, has 
been the Democratic movement. 

All truly great poets are universal in their sympa- 
thies and touch truths that bring out the essential 
nature of man; and in this way by cutting through the 
accidental and factitious to the essential, they give men 
common hopes and common sympathies. Dante, a 
Romanist, places men under one moral government 
rather than under the laws of the Church. Milton 
broke from his natural association of Church and Roy- 
alist, to espouse the cause of the people in the Puritan 
Revolution. In Cowper, through his religious feelings, 
the idea of mankind as a whole is first seen in English 
song. His interest in man is as wide as the world. 
He is profoundly moved by all the social and moral 
questions of the race. He deals with life as a sublime 
reality. Burns gave even a stronger impulse to the 
democratic spirit. All the interests of man touched 
his heart. He felt keenly and sang passionately and 
musically of all that entered into the homely experi- 
ences of life about him. Byron and Shelley, born 
aristocrats, were not defenders of class and hereditary 
privilege, but made song the weapon of human rights. 

The new idea of man, thus voiced by the poets, had 
been developing for a century under the purer teach- 
ing of Christianity as in the Wesley revival in England, 
in the reaction from a false view of state and Church 
under the radical thinkers of France, and in the ever- 
growing freedom and reach of commerce and travel. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 17 


The American Revolution gave force and movement 
to the cause of human rights. The impassioned words 
of orators on both sides of the sea quickened the 
popular thought. Natural rights belonged to every 
man and bound all men together. There was the 
society of man, wider and more important than the 
narrow sets of kindred and taste. There was the state 
of man, in which each man had the sovereignty of a 
citizen. So wealth, class, customs, powers of state, 
whatever interfered with the possession and use of 
natural rights, must be overthrown as hostile to the 
true interests of man. Such ideas had long been ex- 
pressed by French writers: they were expressed in 
action by the overthrow of the Bastile in 1789, and in 
the proclamation of the new constitution in the fol- 
lowing year. They at once became living powers in 
the world. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, accepted 
them at first, but refused to follow them into the vio- 
lence of the Reign of Terror. Scott was driven to 
the romantic past by his pain at the present. Byron 
absorbed their spirit and expressed it in his rebellion 
against social and moral laws. When these ideas had 
lost their force, Shelley reéxpressed them in more ideal 
form. 

The effect upon literature of the popular ideas con- 
cerning the rights of man, was to increase the resist- 
ance to the bondage of criticism, and by the powerful 
feelings they kindled in men, to bring passion into 
style in its work about man and nature. The move- 
ments for civil liberty entered as strongly into the 
poetry of the century, as the Protestant Reformation, 
the movement of religious liberty, affected the litera- 
ture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the 
poetry of Spenser and Shakspere and Milton. 


18 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


A third force of the higher life of the century has 
been philosophic and religious, a new spirit as to the 
questions of being. Every question of nature must in 
the end be a question of man. And every question 
of human rights suggests the problem of the soul from 
which these rights arise. 

The influences in philosophy and religion have been 
vigorous and progressive. It has been a struggle of 
conflicting theories. 

The utilitarian tendency of English thought was 
further developed by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. 
The critical and skeptical tendencies of the utilitarian 
school called forth a line of Scotch metaphysicians, 
Reid and Hamilton and their followers, the school of 
natural realists, the strong supporters of the spiritual 
life. 

The latent materialism of Locke, in his quiet denial 
of innate ideas, had sprung up in the quicker soil of 
France into religious unbelief and revolutionary social 
theories. And this reflex wave of English philosophy, 
returning through the French mind, made the contest 
the more intense. 

Coleridge, an eager student of all these enquiries, 
interpreted to English minds the transcendental 
thought of Germany, and gave emphasis to fue facts 
of our higher, intuitive nature. 

The new religious zeal of the age, striving for the 
neglected at ee and abroad, held firmly through all 
speculation and attack to the central truths of Chris- 
tianity and discovered new lines of intellectual defense. 
“Thus the nineteenth century opened a _ pregnant 
spring-time, in which the useful, the beautiful, and 
the worthless struggled together for sunlight.” 

Through the century science, philosophy, theology 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 19 


have been in ceaseless action and reaction. The earlier 
schools have been modified by evolutionary philosophy 
and new forms of idealism. Revolt has softened into 
agnosticism. The critical spirit has grown to be the 
questioning one, 


That will not make its judgments blind. 


There is a fearless, earnest, and on the whole reverent 
spirit of enquiry. The questions of the soul are felt 
to be the supreme questions of life. 

These age-forces, of science, democracy, religion, 
are all creative. They have fed the imagination and 
stirred the emotions and helped to produce an age of 
great poetry. 

Of the remarkable group of singers in the first third 
of the century, Scott, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, 
Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, I take the last as the 
best embodiment of the spirit of the times, as the one 
in whom we understand its temper and feel its direc- 
tive force. As Matthew Arnold says, comparing 
Wordsworth with contemporary poets, “He deals with 
more life than they do: he deals with life as a whole 
more powerfully.” Such a life must have a message 
for the soul of man. 


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The Poet of the Hills 





CHAPTER Il 
THE POET OF THE HILLS 


Fifty years ago Wordsworth was a prophet to the 
best minds of the English race. Scores of men who 
have quickened our minds and given us purified taste, 
like Arnold and Kingsley, Robertson and Stanley, 
Shairp and Bryant and Lowell were glad to say of 
Wordsworth, transferring what the poet writes of his 
sister,— 


He gave me eyes, he gave me ears, 

And humble cares, and delicate fears; 

A heart the fountain of sweet tears, 
And love and thought and joy. 


The other day a follower of Izaak Walton was wad- 
ing waist-deep in the waters of an Adirondack stream. 
The river had swept with a rapid and shallow curve 
into a long, quiet and pebbly pool, bordered with alders 
and partly shaded with the beeches and spruces of a 
virgin forest. The day’s fishing must come to an end 
for the lower rim of the sun was beginning to touch 
the western tree line, and a trail of three miles led 
over the hills to the camp. A single cast more where 
the current ripples under the overhanging bank. A 
big trout rises to the tail-fly and comes a little short. 
He breaks water at a second cast and is struck hard 
and the contest for the creel begins. But the fish is 


23 


24 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


lightly hooked and the strong deep current is against 
the angler and a few minutes’ struggle gives the big 
fish his freedom again. A swarm of black flies settle 
upon the fisherman and add their mocking comment to 
the day’s unlucky ending. When from the thicket on 
the north bank a chorus of wood-thrushes begin their 
vesper song. “No human voice, no instrument that 
human skill has devised, can give that almost holy 
quality of tone. It was song, the rapturous outpouring 
of the heart; and it was worship, lifting the soul out 
of every hindering vestment to thrill with the thoughts 
of God.” How was it that the whole scene was clothed 
in new light, that the earth seemed to have a new 
beauty and welcome for her child, that this wondrous 
frame of things was instinct with divine life. It was 
Wordsworth who had helped to make the soul sensitive 
to the impress of higher powers, who had given “an 
eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep 
power of joy, to see into the life of things.’’ And it is 
well at times to be called away from the dust and din 
of city streets, away from the close air of artificial 
life, away from the strife of tongues, to live in the 
sun and feel how good it is, to know how few are the 
wants of man, to find life like an October morning 
transparent to the very verge, to wake truths that 
perish never. 
Wordsworth is called the poet of the hills. Only the 
mountains could make him what he was. The creative 
and inspiring soul is above every circumstance and 
Wordsworth would have been Wordsworth anywhere, 
but God placed him in an environment that called forth 
the impulses of deepest birth. His poetry has not only 
the unity of great ideas, but the unity of a single back- 
ground. He spent his whole life almost within sight 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 25 


of Skiddaw and Helvellyn. As John Ruskin found 
strange delight in getting a land-line cutting against 
the sky and traced his power to judge of art from 
gazing at the Cumberland hillsides or the long lines 
of surf, so Wordsworth felt the passion of the haunt- 
ing cataract, in the solitude of the hills found the 
grandeur of man’s nature, and in the visions of the 
upper air had awakened 


those shadowy recollections, 
Which be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing. 


Wordsworth spent his youth among the hills. He 
never knew the leveling and commonizing influence of 
crowded centers, life limited and suppressed by the 
stereotyping of form. He grew as naturally and as 
freely as a tree of the field. He grew by all those 
indefinable influences of field and forest, lake and 
mountain, the cosmic forces that made him a child of 
Nature. What other child has been so early and deeply 
moved by the scenes and forces of the natural world! 
He was in love with its color, its motion, its changing 
expression; Nature was a satisfying companionship. 
She was food, playmate, nurse, mother. Have we 
any words in literature to be put beside those of 
Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” as the truthful por- 
trait of a similar boyhood: 


The sounding cataract 
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, 
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, 
Their colors and their forms, were then to me 


26 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


An appetite: a feeling and a love, 
That had no need of a remoter charm, 
By thought supplied, or any interest 
Unborrowed from the eye. 


And later when his dreams of brotherhood were 
shattered by the excesses of the French Revolution, 
when he abandoned all moral questions in despair, and 
his eyes were closed to the visions of the hills, and 
his poetic power had gone with the closing of the 
spiritual eye, when the Philistines of doubt had made 
him a blind Samson shorn of his strength; then the 
“homely nurse” of his childhood restored him to his 
true self, the heated nature was calmed amid the scenes 
of his youth, the imagination regained its vigor and 
the heart was opened to the messages of the world. 
And through this deep experience of sorrow and 
meditation grew the power of spiritual interpretation, 
so that the senses were not a veil but an eye into the 
heart of things. The Poet stood now in a larger world. 
“His eye now looked on nature with the wonder of 
the world’s childhood, mellowed with the reflective- 
ness of its mature age.” Nature was more than a 
delicious sensation, an inspiring rapture: it was 
a profound revelation. The lover had become the 
seer. 

And Wordsworth lived out of doors and composed 
out of doors and his best poems have the tonic of the 
mountain air. Dove Cottage and Allanbank and Rydal 
Mount were only shelters for the person; his real 
home was walled by the hills and the sky. “This is 
the place where he keeps his books,” said the servant 
to the visitor at Rydal Mount, “his study is out of 
doors.” 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 27 


But who is he, with modest looks, 

And clad in homely russet-brown? 

He murmurs near the running brooks 
' A music sweeter than their own. 


He is retired as noon-tide dew, 

Or fountain in a noon-day grove; 
And you must love him, ere to you 
He will seem worthy of your love. 


Wordsworth never had to say to himself, “Now I 
will study nature. Now I will see what secrets this 
world will yield to the inquisitive spirit.” It was not 
so much a matter of study as of fellowship. It was 
the interpretation of a kindred feeling. He saw and 
felt because he loved. 


The eye—it can not choose but see: 

We cannot bid the ear be still; 

Our bodies feel, where’er they be, 
Against, or with our will. 


Nor less I deem that there are Powers 
Which of themselves our minds impress; 
That we can feed this mind of ours 

In a wise passiveness. 


Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum 

Of things forever speaking, 

That nothing of itself will come 
But we must still be seeking? 


Why did Wordsworth so love nature that he spent 
a life in receiving her impressions, that he found a 
satisfying companionship in her presences, that the 
meanest flower that blows could suggest thoughts too 


28 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


deep for tears? Was it because of his rare endow- 
ment of imagination and feeling, that he saw more 
minutely and felt more exquisitely than others the 
manifold phases of the physical world; that form and 
color and motion, order and harmony and beauty made 
their appeal to his esthetic nature, that he was enrap- 
tured of the music of the spheres? Not on esthetic 
but on spiritual grounds is this to be accounted for. 
It is only to be explained by his finding the spirit 
within the form, and communing with the Infinite Life. 
He received the impress not only of external form but 
of those imperishable truths of being of which nature 
is but the visible vesture. 

Two truths underlie the world’s highest poetry, viz. : 
this world but the vestibule of the eternal, and God in 
whom man lives hére and shall live forever. If imag- 
ination is a divine faculty, a power of vision, and grant 
the existence of a spiritual world, a Great Spirit the 
giver and Lord,—and poets, if their eyes are not 
blinded by a false love, if imagination is kept true by 
a pure love, must help the world to realize the highest 
truths of being; they must be witnesses for God and 
the soul and immortality. And they have been such 
witnesses. Poets see and feel 


the ever-during power, 
And central peace subsisting at the heart 
Of endless agitation. 


God presses on the spirit of the poet: in the hours when 
that spirit aspires highest and acts noblest, this vast 
appearance of things material is suddenly touched and 
spiritualized. So the poets help to restore to us the 
clearness of sight, and the vigor of faith,—the restora- 
tion of our truest selves. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 29 


Every reader of Wordsworth feels that there is 
something higher than his own life, something infi- 
nitely more than the impressions of material things 
upon his own mind, that he stands before visions of 
the hills, presences in the sky. Such poetry conduces 
to the sense of mystery; it helps to the feelings of awe 
and reverence; it leads at least into the vestibule of 
the temple. But does it carry us further, into the 
inner shrine, to kneel before the altar in gratitude 
and penitence and aspiration before the Father of our 
Spirits, the personal God of moral majesty and eternal 
compassion? Is the poetry of Wordsworth Theistic? 
Does he make us feel God clothing Himself in the 
light and beauty, and the form and force of nature? 

There are those who think Wordsworth simply 
Pantheistic, that nature strikes the harp of life, and 
in its music the personal life of God and even self 
seem to tremble out of sight. And they think of such 
lines as the twenty-seventh sonnet: 


Listen! the mighty Being is awake, 
And doth with his eternal motion make 
A sound like thunder, everlastingly, 


in which God and nature seem to be identified. Again 
in the poem to the daisy, he speaks of the influence of 
the lowly flower upon his own spirit, as something 
spiritual, but he does not go so far as to connect it 
with the message of the Eternal Spirit. Nature is 
spiritualized but not with the breath of the personal 
spirit : 

Fresh smitten by the morning ray 

When thou art up, alert and gay, 

Then, cheerful flower! my spirits play 

With kindred gladness: 


30 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


And when, at dusk, by dews opprest 

Thou sink’st, the image of thy rest 

Hath often eased my pensive breast 
Of careful sadness. 


And all day long I number yet, 

All seasons thro’, another debt, 

Which I, wherever thou art met, 
To thee am owing: 


An instinct call it, a blind sense, 

A happy, genial influence, 

Coming one knows not how, nor whence, 
Nor whither going. 


And in the short lyric, “A slumber did my spirit seal,” 
the poet ends with the life returning to its mother 
earth. 


A slumber did my spirit seal; 
I had no human fears: 

She seemed a thing that could not feel 
The touch of earthly years. 


No motion has she now, no force: 
She neither hears nor sees, 

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, ~ 
With rocks, and stones, and trees. 


And so careless readers (not real students and lovers) 
have sometimes thought that however loyal Words- 
worth might be to the Church, it was more out of 
respect to its social authority than to its spiritual, and 
that in his real life he was simply a worshiper of 
nature, using religious terms and full of religious feel- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 31 


ings, but meaning little more than the mysterious and 
awesome force or forces of the life of the world. 

Now it is not claimed that Wordsworth ever set 
himself the distinct task of teaching Theism—at least 
not in his best poetry,—the formal, didactic spirit is 
not the poetic; but the lover of Wordsworth as firmly 
believes that he brings us into living touch with God, 
spiritual apprehension of Him, as that Nature herself 
is a revelation, that the “invisible things of Him are 
clearly seen by the things that are made.” 

Let us try to follow Wordsworth’s own way of 
revealing God, not didactic teaching about God, but 
helping us to see and feel Him; perhaps it might be 
better to say God’s way of training the poet into spir- 
itual knowledge. 

Wordsworth feels the infinttude of life around him 
and beyond him. That’s the way a man comes to true 
self-knowledge and to spiritual desire, by feeling his 
own limitation, his weakness and littleness and igno- 
rance in the face of forces that he cannot measure and 
thought that leads along too dizzy heights for him to 
follow. The immeasurableness and mystery of the 
world in which he lived possessed his imagination 
from a child and are strongly felt in his first poems. 
He felt it in the “disappearing line’ of the public 
highway, 


that crossed 
The naked summit of a far-off hill, 
Beyond the limits that my feet had trod 
Was like an invitation into space, 
Boundless, or guide into eternity. 


He felt it as he stood under the quiet stars, or as the 
night blackened with a coming storm; he drank in the 


32 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


visionary power, he felt the moods of shadowy exalta- 
tion, he retained the sense of possible sublimity. The 
poem on “The Simplon Pass” expresses the infinite 
environment of man’s life. 


The immeasurable height 
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, 
The stationary blasts of waterfalls, 
And in the narrow rent, at every turn, 
Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn, 
Remained, no pleasant images of trees, 
Of sea or sky, no colors of green fields; 
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live 
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind 
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. 


After the “merciless ravage” of the hazel bushes, 
he felt a sense of pain when he beheld the silent trees 
and the intruding sky as though he had done despite to 
a sentient life: 


Then, dearest maiden! move along these shades 
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand 
Touch—for there is a spirit in the woods. 


and in “Expostulation and Reply” he voices the sense 
of Powers 


Which of themselves our minds impress. 


This feeling of mighty and mysterious forces about 
and above the life of man, appearing in the forms of 
nature, while a natural basis of religion, is not in itself 
religion; it may lead only to awe and fear and super- 
stition, the creation of all the nature-worship of pagan- 
ism, the elfin-brood of fairyland. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 33 


But when this sense of awe and mystery, this con- 
sciousness of the infinitude of life is held by a pure 
and humble soul, sensitive and meditative, above all 
one enlightened by the teachings of Christ, one expects 
to find the dim shadows of other and higher powers 
than self take the form or conception of an infinite 
life, that has thought and feeling and will. 

There is everywhere in Wordsworth’s poetry the 
tendency to seek to grasp the world as a whole, to 
rise above details to the center and soul of all phe- 
nomena, to infinite being, to the one infinite being. He 
carried the God-consciousness; and the interest in na- 
ture, the wealth of its unfolding, the joy and satisfac- 
tion in it was in that a spirit communed with his spirit. 
The poetry of Wordsworth is often thrilling with 
Divinity as Nature herself. “The Heart Leap Well” 
is the lesson of Jesus that the Father careth for the 
creatures of the earth. 


Gray-headed shepherd, thou hast spoken well; 
Small difference lies between thy creed and mine: 
This beast not unobserved by nature fell; 

His death was mourned by sympathy divine. 


The Being, that is in the clouds and air, 

That is in the green leaves among the groves, 
Maintains a deep and reverential care 

For the unoffending creatures whom he loves. 


It is the spirit of Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner’: 


He prayeth well who loveth well 
Both man and bird and beast; 
He prayeth best who loveth best 


34 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


All things both great and small: 
For the dear God who loveth us 
He made and loveth all. 


In the first part of the “Prelude,” written early in 
his poetic work, immediately following the description 
of mysterious shapes and powers touching his life 
(already quoted), is this personal and_ spiritual 
interpretation : 


Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe! 

Thou soul that art the eternity of thought, 
That givest to forms and images a breath 
And everlasting motion, not in vain 

By day or star-light thus from my first dawn 
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 
The passions that build up our human soul; 
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man; 
But with high objects, with enduring things,— 
With life and nature, purifying thus 

The elements of feeling and of thought, 

And sanctifying, by such discipline, 

Both pain and fear, until we recognize 

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. 


Then in “Tintern Abbey,” written about the same 
time, we have the noblest work of imagination in put- 
ting in immortal form the dim and vanishing sense 
of a spiritual presence that men so often have in the 
more beautiful or striking forms of the natural world. 


And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 35 


Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air 
And-the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 

A motion and a spirit, that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the woods, 

And mountains; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and-ear, both what they half create, 
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize 
In nature and the language of the sense, 

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being. 


But is this conception of a Presence of such a nature, 
to use the words of Ex-President Patton, that if na- 
ture herself were destroyed, the Presence would re- 
main? How can we know? How can we thus set the 
sharp, hard and fast lines of our Theism? If our 
thought is humble and reverent, how can we help the 
lines of our thinking shading off into the dim and 
indefinable. It may not be logic, but it is true to the 
soul’s experience. 

Now there are three ways of looking at our experi- 
ence of the world of nature and life. It may be 
considered a mass of separate, unrelated facts, any 
connection between them a matter of accident or cus- 
tom or association. This is the so-called atomic theory 
—‘things are conjoined but not connected.” It is of 
course atheistic. There can be no thought of God in 
a universe of chance. It is needless to say if such 
thought had possessed Wordsworth, he had not been 
the poet of nature. He was only 


36 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Contented, when with bliss ineffable 
He felt the sentiment of Being spread 
O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still. 


Again, if things are not accidentally joined but con- 
nected by the idea of ends and order, then we must 
think of a power beyond our experience, yet in it, 
underlying all things and working through all things, 
substantial and abiding. If this power is unconscious, 
coming to consciousness only in man, then it is Pan- 
theism. The trouble, to use the language of John 
Veitch, is to think of “a formless, indeterminate force 
passing into the formed, definite, unending variety of 
this beautiful world; of the conscious personality of 
man rising out of the abyss of formless, undirected 
energy.” Personality, and so freedom and responsi- 
bility are only haunting shadows. The ethic of Pan- 
theism, higher or lower, is fatalism. 

If this power underlying all things and working 
in all things is conscious, conscious of itself and con- 
scious of its workings, then it is a personal power 
with thought and will, and this power is God. It is 
Theism, in whatever way you state or condition the 
truth. From this conscious power comes man, 


From God who is our home, 


and from this fact comes the significance to man of 
the environing world. On this simple distinction is 
fixed Wordsworth’s place as an immortal witness for 
the Person and Presence of God. 

The Presence of God! for the special grace of 
Wordsworth’s poetry is to make men conscious of God, 
that God is in His world, and that its beautiful and 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 37 


beneficent life demand Him and manifest Him. He 
was a Prophet of God to his generation. 

And he came like all the other prophets, sent of God, 
when there was great need of him. For a long time 
nature had been severed from God. It was not so in 
the teachings of prophets, of Christ and the Apostles. 
The eastern Church still to a degree kept the thought 
of God in life, but Augustine and still more his modern 
disciple Calvin put stress upon the legal relations of God 
and made His working a matter of law and not so much 
of life. Puritan theology had little sympathy with 
nature. Milton is an exception in his “Hymn to the 
Nativity,” in having the earth and the elements in har- 
mony with the joy of the Incarnation. Nature was 
dark with the sin of man. The very earth was cursed, 
and the forest shades were peopled with evil spirits, 
and the elements were the scourges of an angry God. 
The first sermon of Davenport to the little colony of 
New Haven was from the text, ‘“Then was he led into 
the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil.” It was a 
natural reaction from this Puritan theology, an inev- 
itable swing of the pendulum, to the deism and prac- 
tical infidelity of the eighteenth century with its distant 
God and its automatic universe. You have but to take 
up the formal and lifeless perfection of Pope to know 
what nature and life are to the Poet without the She- 
kinah. “Life is only drest for show, mean handy-work 
of craftsman, cook or groom.” 


No grandeur now in nature or in book 
Delights us. 


Wordsworth was a creative force in spiritual thought 
as well as poetry. He assailed Pope’s mechanical view 


38 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


of nature no less than his artificial view of verse. “He 
regarded it as his sacred mission to show that the world 
is full of beauty and meaning because it is throbbing 
with the life of God.” He doesn’t argue about God, 
any more than Jesus does; he suggests no didactic 
reasons for his Being; but he opens that inward eye 
which is the bliss of solitude, to the presence of the 
Infinite Life, to its beauty on the morning hills, its 
vitality in the “grandeur of the forest tree,’ the 
Presence 


Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: 
A motion and a spirit, that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all. 


The way to convince a man that there is music in 
Chopin (or any master) is to play, to truly interpret, 
one of his nocturnes, and his nature will respond to 
this breath of life. And so in the poetry of Words- 
worth you feel the manifestation of God, His presence 
in the world that impresses itself upon the soul of the 
poet. You read with uncovered head; you go out as 
from the Presence Chamber. He is the poet of natural 
religion. 

He can add nothing to the Theistic Conception of 
Christ. It may be said that without the personal reve- 
lation of God in Christ, we should not have the poet’s 
sensitive nature and spiritual vision. But it is a great 
strengthener of faith, an enlargement of the spiritual 
life of men to be able to see with Wordsworth all 
created things tremulous with the life of God. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 39 


For the discerning intellect of man 
_ When wedded to this goodly universe 

In love and holy passion, shall find these 
A simple product of the common day. 


It is God’s presence that is felt; not law but life. 
It is the immanence of God, the truth that will make 
nature the nurse of the soul. Wordsworth was the 
prophet and teacher of this spiritual interpretation of 
nature, the truth recently expressed of the super- 
natural in the natural: “I now conceive of God as 
in His universe. I conceive of creation as a growth. 
I conceive of Him as making the universe somewhat 
as our spirit makes our body, shaping and changing 
and developing it by processes from within. The 
figures from the finite to the infinite are imperfect and 
misleading, but this is the figure which best repre- 
sents to me my own thought of God’s relation to the 
universe: not that of an engineer who said one morn- 
ing, ‘Go to, I will make a world,’ and in six days or 
six thousand years or millions of years, made one by 
forming it from without, as the potter forms the clay 
with skilful hand; but that of a Spirit who has been 
forever manifesting himself in the works of creation 
and beneficence in all the universe, one little work of 
whose wisdom and beneficence we are and we see.” 
(Lyman Abbott. ) 

Wordsworth’s personal faith was very simple; it had 
the simplicity of one who 


Mid all this mighty sum 
Of things forever speaking 


had heard the voice of the great soul. ‘Theologians 
may puzzle their heads about dogmas as they will; the 


40 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


religion of gratitude can not mislead us. Of that we 
are sure; and gratitude is the handmaid to hope, and 
hope the harbinger of faith. I look abroad upon na- 
ture, I think of the best part of our species, I lean 
upon my friends, and I meditate upon the Scripture, 
especially the Gospel of St. John, and my creed rises 
up of itself, with the ease of an exhalation, yet a fabric 
of adamant.” 
Wordsworth wrote of the poets: 


Blessings be with them—and eternal praise, 
Who give us nobler loves, and nobler cares— 
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs 
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! 


And the prayer that his name might be numbered 
among theirs has certainly been answered. 

His readers acknowledge the beneficent influence of 
his poetry. To love Wordsworth is the attainment of 
a pure and spiritual taste. The poetry of nature has 
a quieting effect upon the soul: it hushes the stormy 
passions into peace. The reading of his poems on 
nature is like going out from city streets, from its 
din and dust and glare, from the flitting of men and 
the grinding of rails,—to hills soft with forest green, 
along streams edged with cool thickets and meadows 
fringed with yellows and reds. It cools the fevered 
pulse and soothes the tired nerves, and tells us that 
life is not the mere tool or slave of toil and haste and 
gain, but a spirit still attended with gifts of beauty 
and joy. 


There is a blessing in the air, 

Which seems a sense of joy to yield 

To the bare trees, and mountains bare 
And grass in the green field. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 4I 


To learn to love the poetry of Wordsworth is to gain 
a taste for simplicity. The love of show and power, 
the lust of the senses, that makes the complexity and 
strain of modern life, the gathering of its manifold 
trifles, is abashed before the eye that finds its wealth 
in the flower beneath the hedge, the colors of the 
sunset hills, the slowly upcurling mists, 


A host of golden daffodils. 


Wings have we, and as far as we can go 
We may find pleasure: wilderness and wood, 
Blank ocean and mere sky, support that mood 
Which with the lowly sanctifies the low. 


It is a wonderful thing to feel the beauty of the world, 
to have a sense of its wondrous form and color and 
motion. Had Wordsworth done nothing more than 
help the vision of the beautiful, he had been among 
the richest gifts of song. And no man opens the eyes 
more than he does. 

But above all he opens the eyes to the spiritual 
beauty of the world. He cultivates the devout spirit. 
He speaks of the first mild day of March, 


Each minute sweeter than before— 


Love, now an universal birth, 
From heart to heart is stealing, 

From earth to man, from man to earth: 
It is the hour of feeling. 


One moment now may give us more 
Than fifty years of reason; 

Our minds shall drink at every pore 
The spirit of the season. 


42 THER, SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Some silent laws our hearts will make, 
Which they shall long obey: 

We for the year to come may take 
Our temper from to-day. 


And from the blessed power that rolls 
About, below, above, 

We'll frame the measure of our souls: 
They shall be tuned to love. 


There’s wisdom in the music of the woodland linnet. 
The throstle is no mean preacher. 


One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can. 


Nature can so inform 


The mind that is within us; so impress 

With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 

Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb 

Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. 

While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 

We see into the life of things. 


CHAPTER III 


A Poet of Democracy 





CHAR UERSiit 
A POET OF DEMOCRACY 


Wordsworth was essentially a philosopher of human 
life. “His message from nature is wonderful, but his 
message from humanity is more profound.” It can 
be said that he came to his human interest and knowl- 
edge through his love for nature. His youth was 
natural, joyous, one of a merry crew, fond of all the 
sports that took him into the open air, but he was not 
exceptional for his companionships ; but he was excep- 
tional for the mysterious spell over him of natural 
objects. Thus he came to regard objects outside of 
self and he soon came to regard men as an inseparable 
part of the environment of his own life. As he says 
in Michael: 


And hence this tale, when I was yet a boy 
Careless of books, yet having felt the power 
Of nature by the gentle agency 

Of natural objects, led me on to feel 

For passions that were not my own, and think 
On man, the heart of man, and human life. 


As a youth, nature was a sensation, a satisfying de- 
light; he “held unconscious intercourse with beauty,” 
“drinking in a pure, organic pleasure,” but with a 
man’s reason, the interest in nature became deeper, 
for its impressions upon the mind, because of its mes- 


45 


46 THE, SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


sage and ministry to the soul. It was the environment 
of man, and so the world had a new meaning to him. 


I have learned 
To look on nature, not as in the hour 
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes 
The still, sad music of humanity. 


Then we must remember that the years of his active 
manhood are from 1790 to 1830, years when the rights 
of man, the vision of a new society of man filled the 
thoughts of ardent, generous souls. “He grew up with 
the Revolution and survived it, and knew in life or 
rendered in art all its successive phases.” 


Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, 
France standing on the top of golden hours, 
And human nature seeming born again. 


The heart of Wordsworth was given to the people and 
his love was theirs. 


He looked with awe 
Upon the faculties of man; received 
Gladly the highest promises, and hailed 
As best, the government of equal rights 
And individual worth. 


And though his dream was shattered of the speedy 
triumph of republican principles, and in seeming reac- 
tion he turned with pain and sadness from schemes 
of human rights to the isolation of the hills, he was 
true to his early vows, his heart was given to the peo- 
ple, and his love was never withdrawn. Though he 
was convinced that his mission was to be a poet and 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 47 


not to break his heart on the hard problems of civil 
rights, his poetry has been the noblest social force, 
working for the recognition of the essential worth of 
man. He has been called the “high priest of the new 
democracy.” The lovers of Wordsworth have been 
lovers of men: they have been forces in the demo- 
cratic movement. 

As nature led Wordsworth to man, we notice that 
every character in his poems is associated with some 
natural object. The pictures of himself are connected 
with some scene of the outer world. 


The poet murmurs near the running brooks. 
He sits on that old gray stone. 


Lucy 


dwelt among the untrodden ways 
Beside the Springs of Dove. 


The gray rocks, the household lawn, the veil of trees, 
the fall of water, the little bay, the quiet road,—they 
are all together a part of the “Highland Girl,” 


Like something fashioned in a dream. 


The leech-gatherer and the lonely moor are inseparable. 
Michael stands by the half-built sheepfold; and the 
pathos of Margaret is felt in the unkept garden and 
the red stains and tufts of wool on the cornerstone of 
the cottage porch, where the sheep were now per- 
mitted to come and couch unheeded. The unison of 
streams brings him comfort in the national sorrow at 
the hourly-expected death of Fox. When he first 
looked on Yarrow, he 


48 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


stood, looked, listened, and with thee, 
Great minstrel of the Border ! 


On the banks of the Nith, he 


asks of Nature, from what cause 
And by what rules 
She trained her Burns to win applause 
That shames the Schools. 


In every case nature is the environment of the person 
or incident, as in life itself; the lines of character or 
action the sharper and more significant because of this 
realistic background. But nature is the inspirer of the 
thoughts of man. In this subtle sympathy and voic- 
ings of nature does the poet come to the conception of 
the significance of human life. But man is the chief 
thing. Man gives value to the encompassing world. 
This truth is vividly felt in the “Highland Girl.” 

There is a photograph taken by a seminary student 
of a mountain pass in Switzerland. Part way up this 
long sinuous line, lost at last among the peaks, stands 
a solitary figure. It was an artist’s and a philosopher’s 
instinct that took the view just at that moment. The 
distances can be measured by this human step. The 
man throws new light upon nature, and you feel that 
the meaning of all is wrapped up in the traveler trying 
to reach yonder height. It is a symbol of how Words- 
worth came to human interest through his feelings for 
nature, and how the very significance of nature was 
found in its relation to the human spirit. 


Yea, what were mighty Nature’s self? 
Her features, could they win us, 
Unhelped by the poetic voice 
That hourly speaks within us? 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 49 


Not only are all the characters in Wordsworth’s poetry 
connected with natural objects, but the most of them, 
and certainly the most significant are from humble 
life, such people as he met in the villages and along 
the ways of Westmoreland. A shepherd, a leech- 
gatherer, a reaper, a poor woman, a beggar, a little 
child. The hero of “The Excursion” is a peddler. 
Like Burns, he certainly built a princely throne on 
humble truth. And Wordsworth in his letters has 
given us a statement of the principle of this choice 
of subjects and of poetic language. “The principal 
object proposed in these poems, was to choose inci- 
dents and situations from common life, and to relate 
or describe them, throughout as far as possible, in a 
selection of language really used by men, and at the 
same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of 
imagination, whereby ordinary things should be pre- 
sented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, 
and above all, to make these incidents and situations 
interesting by tracing in them, truly though not osten- 
tatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly, as 
far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas 
in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was 
generally chosen, because in that condition the essen- 
tial passions of the heart find a better soil in which 
they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, 
and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; 
because in that condition of life our elementary feelings 
coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, conse- 
quently, may be more accurately contemplated, and 
more forcibly communicated; because the manners of 
rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, 
and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, 
are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; 


50 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of 
men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent 
forms of nature.” (App. vol. 2, p. 192.) 

What was Wordsworth’s interest in human life? 
His interest was not in the minute details of life about 
him. Everything of man did not concern him. He 
was a solitary figure among the hills, indulging in no 
neighborly gossip, not very approachable, not putting 
himself by sympathy into other lives, and so not greatly 
concerning himself about the interests and events of 
daily life. He did not write about humble men and 
women because of a humanity that responded to every 
event and every life. 

Nor is he interested in the unfolding of character, 
the action of heredity upon environment, the soul at 
war with sense,—all that makes the passion and tragedy 
of human life. He has no dramatic instinct like 
Browning, the power to present a life in all the com- 
plexity of its nature and environment. Nor has he the 
lighter touch of Kipling, able to present realistically 
the outer action,—“a man in a world of men.” “The 
Borderers,” the only drama that Wordsworth at- 
tempted, was a dreary failure. 

He has given us one of the finest love lyrics in “She 
was a phantom of delight,’ written of his wife; but 
it is the product of contemplation rather than passion, 
the verse of a man, who on his wedding trip could 
forget that he had a wife in his interest in studying 
inscriptions on tombstones. He is not lacking in in- 
tensity of feeling but it has been disciplined to flow in 
regular channels. The turbulent passions of life have 
settled into a fixed and orderly flow. His love is 
quietly domestic, like his skylark, true to the kindred 
points of heaven and home. It is impossible for 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 51 


Wordsworth to have written the “Ae fond kiss and 
then we part” of Burns, or the “Last Ride Together” 
of Browning, or to have felt that tender and passion- 
ate clinging of true love in “John Anderson, my Jo, 
John” of Allan Cunningham; nor the passion of the 
“Bedouin Love Song” of Bayard Taylor: 


I love thee, I love but thee! 
With a love that shall not die 
Till the sun grows cold, 
And the stars are old, 
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold; 


nor to have reached up to the immortality of love in 
Browning’s “Prospice:” 


I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest. 


Wordsworth’s lines rarely beat with the elemental pas- 
sions of man. His love flows in the channels of simple 
and quiet domestic joys. The modern poet of unre- 
strained feeling has little use for Wordsworth. 


Morn into noon did pass, noon into eve, 
And the old day was welcome as the young, 
As welcome and as beautiful. 


Wordsworth was too grave and serious a nature to 
laugh at the foibles and contradictions of human life. 
He lived in rather a small world of human incident. 
There is something of the provincialism of country 
life. Of the great world, of London, of fashion and 
traffic, of ambition and adventure, he knew little and 
cared less. As regards man he was more of an idealist 


52 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


than a realist. The man of the world, who is keenly 
comparing fractions with wholes, and is able to laugh 
or weep at the contrast, was not joined with the man 
of vision, as so often in modern literature, in Thack- 
eray or Browning. Punch and Life, the children of 
laughter and mockery, had not been born. It is safe 
to say that if Wordsworth had had a little sense of 
humor, he would not have written many things, the 
lines, for example— 


And, whither art thou going, child, 
To-night, along these lonesome ways? 
To Durham, answered she, half wild, 
Then come with me into the chaise, 


and called it poetry. However, we should never have 
had the view of man attended on his way with the 
vision splendid, if he had stopped to laugh. We must 
make our choice. We must accept the seriousness, if 
we would have the vision. And in this Wordsworth 
expressed the best life of his age. The sense of prob- 
lem was too deep, the needs and hopes of men, for the 
leaders to forget the gravity of their purpose. “The 
great outburst of poetic idealism at the first of our 
own century is intensely grave. Peasant-fun and 
peasant-joyousness bubble through the lilts of Burns; 
but after his day, gravity settles down upon us. Of 
the poets of the Revolution only one is ever merry. 
Wordsworth’s peddler in “The Excursion” assuredly 
never either made or took a joke; the blitheness of 
even his ‘Highland Girl’ is too reticent for outward 
mirth; while ‘Peter Bell’ and his ass tell us with every 
bray that they live in a world secure against invasions 
of laughter. There is no more irony nor absurdity in 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 53 


the poems of Shelley than in the sky at dawn. 
Coleridge, controlling the supernatural, grotesque, is 
yet devoid of genuine humor except in one or two 
political poems. So is Keats, though his seriousness 
is not moral but esthetic. One poet, and one alone, 
of that great early group, can to-day reach our affec- 
tions through our amusement. If Byron lives, he 
lives by virtue of wit. The sorrowful recklessness of 
his irony bears the stamp of living power, unknown to 
his heroics or his sentimental tears.” 

And this brings us to the real message of Words- 
worth as to man. He is the poet of the essential worth 
of man. He began as the advocate of the rights of 
man. He was an ardent democrat. Titles and ranks, 
inherited distinctions and rights melted like snow be- 
fore the ardor of his sympathies. The hope of man 
was in political action, and he dreamed of brother- 
hood. When that dream was ruthlessly shattered by 
the excesses of republicanism, and the poet was thrown 
back upon himself,—not to be a social and _ political 
leader but simply a poet,—trusting to the silent and 
pervasive influence of thought upon individual lives 
to make a new earth, he seemed to many lovers of 
liberty to take a reactionary course. As far as political 
faith, he was reactionary. He saw popular movements 
fathered by commercialism. There was a loss of rev- 
erence, and obedience. There was a vulgar pushing 
for rights without regard to worth. There was a rapid 
increase of wealth and vulgar display. The conceptions 
of life were materialized. 


We must run glittering like a brook 
In the open sunshine, or we are unblest— 
The wealthiest man among us is the best. 


54 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


He lived at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 
The factory system drew men from quiet, rural life 
and crowded them into close, noisy, ugly, unwholesome 
towns. A restless competition put women and children 
to work in dark mines and in unsanitary buildings. It 
crushed the hope and beauty of life. And these 
changes were associated in Wordsworth’s mind with 
the Whigs, the party of boasted progress. He heard 
men clamor loudly for reform, and talk bravely of 
the rights of the slave, who were unmindful of the 
fact that so-called progress was built on the sufferings 
of the poor. And so his thought as far as. political 
action went, turned back to the older order. He became 
an advocate of authority; he was a Tory in politics. 
He opposed the Reform bill and other so-called demo- 
cratic measures. He was a great advocate of the 
Established Church as a force for social order. And 
so there were those who felt that Wordsworth had 
betrayed the cause of human rights. Shelley felt so, 
who never knew Wordsworth, and who was always a 
poet of Revolution: 

Poet of nature! thou hast wept to know 

That things depart which never may return: 

Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow, 

Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. 

These common woes I feel. One loss is mine 

Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore, 

Thou wert as a lone star, whose light did shine 

On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar: 

Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood 

Above the blind and battling multitude: 

In honored poverty thy voice did weave 

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty,— 

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, 

Thus having been, that thou should’st cease to be. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 55 


And Browning in his youth felt the same way and ex- 
pressed the protest in verse, that only his manly regret 
in after years could blow away from Wordsworth’s 
clear fame: 


Just for a handful of silver he left us, 

Just for a riband to stick in his coat— 

Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 

Lost all the others, she lets us devote; 

They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, 

So much was theirs who so little allowed: 

How all our copper had gone for his service! 

Rags—were they purple, his heart had been proud! 

We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him, 

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents, 

Made him our pattern to live and to die! 

Shakspere was of us, Milton was for us, 

Burns, Shelley were with us—they watched from their 
graves! 

He alone breaks from the van and the freeman, 

He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! 


We shall march prospering,—not through his presence: 
Songs may inspirit us,—not from his lyre; 

Deeds will be done,—while he boasts his quiescence, 
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: 

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, 
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod, 
One more devil’s triumph and sorrow for angels, 

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! 
Life’s night begins; Let him never come back to us! 
There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, 

Forced praise on our part—the glimmer of twilight, 
Never glad confident morning again! 

Best fight on well, for we taught him—strike gallantly, 
Menace our heart ere we master his own; 


56 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, 
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! 


Such a poem, of which there is no finer scorn unless 
it be Whittier’s “Ichabod,” shows the inevitable mis- 
conception, the disciplined, contemplative course of 
Wordsworth met from the fiery temper of the revolu- 
tionary period. Browning was manly enough in after 
years to confess his mistake, and to wish that his “Lost 
Leader” might not henceforth be associated with 
Wordsworth, but simply as an impassioned plea against 
failure to follow the ideal. Lowell, who certainly was 
a consistent republican, yes, almost a defiant republican, 
says of Wordsworth: “I see no reason to think that 
he ever swerved from his early faith in the beneficence 
of freedom, but rather that he learned the necessity of 
defining more exactly in what freedom consisted, and 
the conditions, whether of time or place, under which 
alone it can be beneficent, of insisting that it must be 
an evolution and not a manufacture, and that it should 
co-ordinate itself with the prior claims of society and 
civilization. . . . He had made the inevitable discovery 
that comes with years, of how much harder it is to do 
than to see what ’twere good to do, and grew content 
to build the poor man’s cottage, since the means did not 
exist of building the prince’s palace he had dreamed.” 

Whatever his political action, his real sentiment 
breathes in his verse and shows itself in his way of 
living. He belonged to the plain people, as much as 
Abraham Lincoln. He not only believed in poverty but 
practiced it. “Plain living and high thinking” will 
always be associated with him. He would not give 
his heart away, with its true vision and pure feeling, 
for any sordid boon of getting and spending. And by 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 57 


virtue of his own simple and pure life, he was able 
to look through all the circumstance of place and garb 
and manner to the life itself. He saw noble life behind 
rough exteriors and hard faces. “His attitude is a 
tender, reverent, direct contemplation of essential 
man.” He takes persons in the humblest circum- 
stances, strips them of all adventitious helps, and shows 
some single trait of nobility. He cares less for clothes 
than the Teufelsdréckh of Carlyle. It has been said 
with much truth that his sympathies were rather for 
men than with them. It was not a question of natural 
likings but of fixed attitude of mind. The ethical 
nature was inseparably bound with the poet; and this 
kept him from fellowship with men whose ways he 
could not approve. But he had sympathy for men 
almost unlimited, felt contempt for no living thing, 
and was able to see the “heart of good in things evil.” 
And wherever the poetry of Wordsworth has become a 
culture, it has worked for the deliverance of the nature 
from the bondage of convention, the false and artificial 
estimates of human pride and taste, and brought man 
into fellowship with his brother man. 


If thou be one whose heart the holy forms 

Of young imagination have kept pure, 

Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride, 
Howe’er disguised in its own majesty, 

Is littleness; that he who feels contempt 

For any living thing, hath faculties 

Which he has never used; that thought with him 

Ts in its infancy. 


He says of the beggar: 


*Tis nature’s law, 
That none, the meanest of created things, 


58 TITE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Of forms created the most vile and brute, 

The dullest or most noxious, should exist 
Divorced from good—a spirit and pulse of good, 
A life and soul, to every mode of being 
Inseparably linked. 


He not only teaches a reverence for human life, but 
a reverence for law; not law as the instrument of 
authority, the rule of tyrants, but law as the true 
course of a man’s life, and the divine voice in human 
society. And so he shows us the glory of fidelity in 
humble spheres, and shows that stern duty 


dost wear 
The God-head’s most benignant grace. 


He teaches the soul, whatever be the hard lot, to admit 
of no decay. 


Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness. 


He teaches fidelity to the whole self. His happy war- 
rior is the man, 


Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth 
Forever, and to noble deeds give birth, 

Or he must go to dust without his fame, 

And leave a dead unprofitable name, 

Finds comfort in himself and in his cause. 


But the praise of humble things and the path of lowly 
fidelity is not an opiate to lull men into low content. 
He feels the wrongs of men, he claims 


That virtuous liberty hath been the scope 
Of his pure song. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 59 


He invokes the spirit of Milton as the genius of English 
freedom: | 


We are selfish men; 
Oh! raise us up, return to us again; 
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power. 
Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; 
Thou had’st a voice whose sound was like the sea: 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, 
So did’st thou travel on life’s common way 
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 


Wordsworth is not universal in his sympathies like 
Shakspere and Browning in that he seems to touch 
every side of man’s nature, all that is in man; but 
universal in that he touches some truth or capacity 
that is in all men. He regards each man as a part of 
humanity, for whom the wondrous ministry of nature 
and human life has been ordained; and teaches rev- 
erence and love, trust and fidelity, by which each life 
is to be measured and to make its contribution to the 
betterment of the whole. “He regards man,” says 
the poet Aubrey de Vere, “not as a busy agent amid the 
turmoil of life, nor yet as an ascetic ‘housed in a 
dream.’ He regards him rather as a being in whom 
there unite countless mysterious influences both from 
the inner world of the spirit and from the visible crea- 
tion of God, constituting, when thus combined, a 
creature destined for lofty contemplation, yet bound 
at the same time by a network of sympathies ‘descend- 
ing to the worm in charity.’ If he looks upon human 
gladness, his ready sympathy with it is seldom un- 
shadowed by a remembrance of the speed with which 
joy passes into sorrow; and when contemplating sor- 


60 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


row, his most abiding thought is that her mission is to 
cleanse, to elevate, and to make free. He sees good 
in all things; yet in all good things, he sees also some 
record of a higher good now lost, so that the rejoicing 
of man seems but the captive’s harping in the land of 
exile. For him the smallest objects have rightful 
claims upon our deeper affections; yet the greatest are 
scarcely worthy of man’s higher desires, for the po- 
tential excellences in them too often are but ‘things 
incomplete and purpose betrayed.’ ” 

Man, the humblest child, is worth regard because 
of his kinship to God. This is the source of Words- 
worth’s universal sympathy, that man has a divine 
nature. The imperfection of human life, its rough ma- 
terials and broken forms, does not shake his faith. 
The world is still a-building, and God is working upon 
human lives. He raises the song of thanks and praise 


For those obstinate questionings 

Of sense and outward things, 

Fallings from us, vanishings; 

Blank misgivings of a creature 

Moving about in worlds not realized, 

High instincts before which our mortal nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised. 


The truths of the soul, of its divine origin and relation- 
ship and destiny, are the 


truths that wake 
To perish never; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 
Nor man nor boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
Can utterly abolish or destroy. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 61 


He interprets life in the light of his own high instincts 
and so sees the divine in the commonplace and finds 
noble lives in rough ways and untoward circumstances. 

And lives that here only begin to grow shall else- 
where have their perfection. The primal sympathy, 
in which we had the beginning of our life, which binds 
us to God, and from which spring soothing thoughts 
in human suffering, this primal sympathy, 


Which having been must ever be 


gives us 


The faith that looks through death. 


The simple, rough lives are so interesting because they 
are the creatures of the endless years. It is no uncon- 
scious immortality like George Eliot’s “Choir Invisi- 
ble,” living in the growing life of mankind, in “lives 
made nobler by our presence,” but the continuance and 
unfolding of a deathless personality. Nowhere has 
Wordsworth expressed his simple faith in life beyond 
death as in “The Primrose of the Rock.” 


A Rock there is whose homely front 
The passing traveler slights; 

Yet there the glow-worms hang their lamps, 
Like stars, at various heights; 

And one coy Primrose to that Rock 
The vernal breeze invites. 


* * * * os 
Sin-blighted though we are, we too, 


The reasoning Sons of Men, 
From one oblivious winter called 


62 THS SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Shall rise, and breathe again; 
And in eternal summer lose 
Our threescore years and ten. 


To humbleness of heart descends 
This prescience from on high, 

The faith that elevates the just, | 
Before and when they die; 

And makes each soul a separate heaven, 
A court for Deity. 


Wordsworth is the poet of democracy because he sees 
and expresses the essential life and hope of every man. 
He is not downcast or forlorn because he sees ill sights 
of madding passions; he speaks of what we are, he 
dreams on things to come; and so he rouses the sensual 
from their sleep of death, and wins the vacant and the 
vain to noble raptures. His life expresses “the image 
of a better time, more wise desires and simple manners.” 

William Watson has paid the fitting tribute to his 
master : 


It may be that his manly chant, beside 

More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune; 

It may be, thought has broadened since he died 
Upon the century’s noon; . 

It may be that we can no longer share 

The faith which from his fathers he received; 

It may be that our doom is to despair 
Where he with joy believed ;— 


Enough that there is none since him who sings 

A song so gotten of the immediate soul, 

So instant from the vital fount of things 
Which is our source and goal: 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 63 


And though at touch of later hands there float 
More artful tones than from his lyre he drew, 
Ages may pass ere trills another note 

So sweet, so great, so true. 





GEA RUE Reel 
Tennyson: The Man and the Poet 





CHAT rik Lyi 
TENNYSON: THE MAN AND THE POE’ 


Six months after the death of Wordsworth, the laurel 
crown of English poetry was on the brow of Alfred 
‘Tennyson. 


This laurel greener from the brows 
Of him that uttered nothing base. 


Is there between the two poets anything more than this 
slight outward connection of Laureateship? Is Tenny- 
son a successor to the poetic spirit and work of the 
simple figure who 


Murmurs near the running brooks 
A sweeter music than their own? 


Above all, is he a successor of the man who found in 
the humblest flower “some concord with humanity”? 
Alike in their conception of the high calling of the 
poet, alike in their single-eyed devotion to the poet-life, 
“in the soul admitting of no decay, no continuance of 
weak-mindedness,” had the right of naming his suc- 
cessor been given to Wordsworth, the mantle of the 
prophet would have fallen on no other than Tennyson. 
For of the latter he writes in 1845, before “The 
67 


68 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Princess” or “In Memoriam” or the “Idylls of the 
King” had seen the light, “He is decidedly the first of 
our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world 
still better things.” 

It is not meant that Tennyson can be called in any 
proper sense a pupil of Wordsworth. He felt that in 
his best work Wordsworth was the successor of Shaks- 
pere and Milton, and often remarked that in the close, 
poetic interpretation of nature, Wordsworth was always 
before them. But “Tennyson is endowed precisely in 
points where Wordsworth wanted,” says Emerson; 
“there is no finer ear, or more command of the keys of 
language.” At times the voice seems that of Words- 
worth, in its philosophic grasp of truth, in its true moral 
sense, and its perception of the subtle relation of nature 
and the human spirit. And again it is the haunting 
melody of Keats, and the glowing colors that thrill and 
satisfy the esthetic nature. 

Tennyson had a catholic mind open to all comers. 
He was appreciative of what was best in contemporary 
work; he knew the noble succession of English song. 
Until he was seventeen Byron was his inspirer, but as 
he outgrew his passionate youth, he laid Byron aside 
and never cared for him again. He always felt that 
Keats had the richest endowment of any modern poet 
and would, had he lived, have fulfilled the promise of 
his youth. He was read in the world-poets, Homer, 
Eschylus, Theocritus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Goethe, 
Schiller, and the French dramatists. Milton and Shaks- 
pere were his daily companions. “Where is my Shaks- 
pere? I must have my Shakspere,” he said in his last 
illness. And he was buried with a copy of “Cymbeline” 
and a laurel wreath from Virgil’s tomb. And yet none 
was his master. He was composite, the union of the 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 69 


poetic schools and influences that made the opening of 
the century an era rich in the sweetest and noblest 
poetry. His poetry is an “imaginative expression of 
life,” not simply the personal expression of the poet 
(he was never so sensitive as towards the efforts of 
certain small critics to find his personal views and life 
in everything he wrote, notably in “Maud”), but to a 
very wide extent, almost a Shaksperean extent, the 
poetic form of the life of the age. The refined, specu- 
lative, questioning life; the minute, peering, aggressive 
life ; the sensitive, believing, ministering life,—the com- 
plex life of the world-century is felt in his pages. And 
yet Alfred Tennyson is no imitator. While the age 
stands revealed, searched almost to its lowest conscious- 
ness in his pages, we feel all the time that a great inter- 
preter is speaking. Everything is transformed in the 
alembic of his own spirit and genius. And he inter- 
prets because he touches life so widely and sympathet- 
ically and then meditates upon it so profoundly, and 
gives us so fearlessly and trustfully what God gives 
him to see. 

The worth of Tennyson is not in his music, as sweet 
and varied as that is, the extraordinary perfection of 
form; but in the mass, variety and elevation of his 
thought. He is widely read, the most so of any English 
poet, because he is so clear and musical and varied; 
but he lives because he interprets life, to use the words 
of Matthew Arnold concerning Wordsworth, “because 
he deals with more of life than others; he deals with 
life as a whole more powerfully.” And he interprets 
because he lives so largely and truly. The man is even 
greater than his work. “Artist and man moved to- 
gether: his nature and his poetry are harmonious as- 
pects of the same soul.” 


70 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


This is borne in upon anyone who reads the memoir 
by his son. One lives in noble company. One feels 
that 


The poet in a golden clime was born, 
* * * * * 


Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love. 


Above all one feels that 


He saw through life and death, through good and ill, 
He saw through his own soul, 
The marvel of the everlasting will 
An open scroll 
Before him lay. 


He interprets the thoughts of many hearts. His poetry 
comes from his life as truly as the best sermon. Poor 
as he was in his early years, he never would write a 
line for money. Postponing for twelve years the 
thought of a home, and at times giving up the hope, 
he would not speak until he had a message and that 
message was put in its noblest form. “The artist should 
do his best for art’s sake, not for popularity,” and this 
for man’s sake. He was one of the most unworldly 
men, yet with deepest interest in the world. One of 
the most sensitive men, suffering from wrong concep- 
tion, yet absolutely above the lust of praise. He said 
of Alexander Smith: “He has plenty of promise, but 
he must learn a different creed to that he preaches in 
those lines beginning, ‘Fame, Fame, thou art next to 
God.’ Next to God,—next to the Devil say I. Fame 
might be worth having if it helped us to do good to a 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 71 


single mortal, but what is it?—only the pleasure of 
having oneself talked of up and down the street.” 

The reading of the life of Tennyson is a help to the 
higher life, and though he disliked the gossip and the 
personal matters often wrongly used in such books and 
never read them himself, holding that a true life is 
seen in its work, the life sheds light upon the work of 
the poet. 

Wordsworth told a friend that he had not spent five 
shillings on new books in as many years; and of the 
few old ones that made up his collection, he had not 
read one fifth. He could never read Goethe and knew 
nothing of many of his contemporaries. His voice was 
pure and strong, but with something of the limitation 
of his singleness and isolation. Tennyson on the con- 
trary is the “heir of all the ages.’ A diligent critic has 
found in the single poem of “In Memoriam” sugges- 
tions of twenty-six great minds, Greek, Latin, Italian, 
English,—historians, essayists, novelists, poets, and yet 
each made the gold of his own coin by being stamped 
with his experience,—as truly his own as the plays of 
Shakspere from the old chronicles of Holinshed. In 
Tennyson one understands how a great culture may 
minister to a great poet. Poetry was his profession, 
the serious business of his life from which nothing 
could divert him. He never suffered himself to waste 
his power in other things, in the doings of society or 
other kinds of work. And for poetry he prepared with 
large system and unwearied devotion, to master the 
materials and measures of his work. As poetry was 
the interpretation of life, and life in the nineteenth 
century meant not simply the life of Englishmen but 
the life of humanity, a world-life, he prepared himself 
to master the chief concerns of human interest: first 


72 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


the great poets of his own land and of European lit- 
erature, the chief periods and persons of modern his- 
tory, the sciences that were making a new earth and 
affecting the thoughts of men, politics as the vital 
questions of society, and above all the discussion of 
philosophy and theology, all the attempts to explain the 
meaning and duty of man. 

So we find him, just from the University, not spend- 
ing his days in dreaming, the occupation of the poet in 
the popular mind, but planning his week’s study and 
holding to his plan, like a teacher or clergyman. And 
in the plan of those early studies were history, German, 
Italian, Greek, English poetry, chemistry, botany, elec- 
tricity, mechanics, and theology. Soon after his mar- 
riage he took to reading different systems of philosophy. 
Spinoza, Berkeley, Kant, Schlegel, Fichte, Hegel, Fer- 
rier were the books added to his already wide reading 
on such subjects. He knew that poetry must touch 
metaphysical subjects only by allusion, but he was not 
afraid of the highest problems that confronted men, 
and was anxious to know the fallacies that warped the 
minds of men and was resolute in proclaiming what 
seemed to him realities. Such studies are seen in his 
high thought, in such poems as “The Higher Pan- 
theism,” “In Memoriam,” “De Profundis’ and “The 
Ancient Sage.” “He often brings up metaphysical 
truths from the deepest depths” is Jowett’s word con- 
cerning him. 

He was always a student of the Bible and eagerly 
read all notable books within his reach relating to the 
Bible, “and he traced with deep interest such funda- 
mental truths as underlie the great religions of the 
world.” He studied Hebrew that he might get the 
spirit of the Old Testament, particularly the Book of 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 73 


Job, which he sometimes dwelt upon as a subject for 
modern poetry. He asked Jowett one day to read a 
line of Job which he did not quite understand, and when 
the great master of Balliol replied that he did not know 
Hebrew, Tennyson said with unfeigned surprise, 
“What! you a priest of a religion and not able to 
read your own sacred books!” 

He not only had this large and generous culture that 
always went on, but he prepared long and thoroughly 
for any special work. The list of books that he read 
for his “Queen Mary” would dismay a historical lec- 
turer. He was as careful as Macaulay to visit every 
scene connected with his characters. J. R. Green, the 
historian of the English people, said that “all his re- 
searches into the annals of the twelfth century had not 
given him so vivid a conception of the character of 
Henry II and his court as was embodied in Tennyson’s 
Becket.” 

He worked his way into the sciences with the same 
patient thoroughness, so that men like Tyndall and 
Huxley, the Duke of Argyle and Lord Kelvin recog- 
nized the worth of his scientific opinions. ‘Since Dante 
no poet in any line so loved the stars,” said a great 
astronomer. There were no mistakes about the stars 
or the flowers in his poems. 

Thackeray declared that Tennyson was the wisest 
man he knew. It is a splendid testimony to the fact 
urged in the first chapter, that the wider the sphere of 
knowledge the wider the bounds of imagination, and 
it is the splendid tribute to the sphere of the poet that 
whatever concerns the human mind may be food for 
the imagination and through poetry may minister to 
the spiritual life of men. 

Tennyson loved nature as truly as Wordsworth, but 


74 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


in a different way. He loved nature for her own sake, 
the deep-voiced music of the pines, the crash and thun- 
der of her seas upon the beach, the sweet notes of the 
thrush or the lark, the green vistas of wooded glades, 
the lights and shadows on the hills, the ominous mut- 
tering and flashing of the storm;—every form and 
power of the world he loved. It satisfied his sense of 
beauty; it quickened his questioning spirit; it subdued 
his mind with its awful mystery and power. 

The first home of his own was in a London suburb, 
Twickenham, famous since the days of Pope; but he 
soon escaped from the distractions of city life to the 
quiet of the country, and he made a true poet’s home 
at Farringford, the Isle of Wight, where he plowed his 
fields and planted his trees and cared for his flowers 
and shrubs with growing love for nearly half a century. 
In the last years of his life, through the residence of 
the Queen at Osborne, and so the world of fashion, and 
the attraction of his own great fame, bringing so many 
strangers to his doors, he felt compelled to make a new 
summer home at Aldworth, on the mainland, in a 
beautiful and retired section of west England where all 
things fair to view grew under his touch. Though he 
spent most of his life in the country, Tennyson was 
no recluse. He simply felt the imperious claim of his 
art to the whole of his energies, and “so was bound 
to abstain from the idle trivialities and current compli- 
ments of society.”” He found the largest and freest life 
for his art in the quiet of nature and books. 

And not only was nature the opportunity for his 
work, but a satisfying companionship. It was all 
worthy of his thought and love. And he gave it the 
attention of his serious and trained mind. Not a 
flower or bird-note escaped his notice. As in Kingsley’s 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 75 


case, it was the love of scientist and artist combined. 
He was not tracing as did Wordsworth the faintest 
marks of nature on the human mind; he was absorbed 
in the marks themselves on the face of nature. He 
loved the touch of nature’s forces, the sun, the rain, 
the wind. He took his walks without regard to sun or 
storm, never protected save by his cloak and thick boots, 
rejoicing to feel the sun and the rain and to know that 
he was alive. And this love of life itself never grew 
old and dim. In the last spring of his life he “enjoyed 
as much as ever the blossoms of apple and pear tree, 
of white lilacs, and of purple aubretia that bordered 
the walks.” He said that he did not believe in Emer- 
son’s pretty lines, 


Only to children children sing, 
Only to youth the Spring is Spring. 


“For age does feel the joy of spring, though age can 
only crawl over the bridge while youth skips the brook.” 

Like Wordsworth he often composed in walking, and 
he took all his nature-similes direct from observation, 
though I do not think that like Wordsworth he de- 
pended upon nature for the quickening of his imagina- 
tion. However, the outward suggestions are marked 
in Tennyson’s poetry, and one is charmed with the 
exactness and variety and beauty of the images of 
nature. 

One constantly hears the sea in his verse. The sea 
was his great passion, its changing beauty, its mighty 
force, its immeasurable mystery, its ceaseless music 
held him like an appetite. ‘““He loved the sea as much 
as any sailor and knew all its moods whether on the 
shore or in midocean. He loved it for its own sake 


76 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


and also because English heroism has ever been con- 
spicuous on shipboard: he felt in himself the spirit of 
the old Norsemen. His delight in the sea more espe- 
cially comes out in such poems as “Enoch Arden,” 
“Ulysses,” “The Revenge,’ “The Voyage,’ “The 
Sailor Boy,” “Sea Dreams,” “Maud,” “Break, Break,” 
and “Crossing the Bar’; and “I remember well,” says 
his son, “his glory in having made these lines in 
‘Boadicea’ : 


“Fear not, isle of the blowing woodland, isle of silvery 


parapets ; 

Thine the liberty, thine the glory, thine the deeds to be 
celebrated, 

Thine the myriad-rolling ocean, light and shadow illimi- 
table.” 


To my mind the most noticeable quality in the per- 
son of Tennyson was his rich and generous humanity. 
Here he differed essentially from Wordsworth, in that 
he loved men, and not simply the essential man. No 
man ever had more or more devoted friends, the best 
mark of his own nobility. At the University such 
pleasant and inspiring fellowship, as Monckton Milnes, 
poet and critic (afterwards Lord Houghton) ; Richard 
Chenevix Trench (Archbishop of Dublin), poet and 
Bible scholar; Dean Alford of Canterbury; W. H. 
Brookfield, the dearest friend and ideal minister of 
Thackeray; Charles Merivale, the historian of the Ro- 
man Empire; James Spedding, a great Greek scholar ; 
Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar; and above all 
Arthur Henry Hallam, the son of the historian, to 
whom “In Memoriam” is the monument, monument 
of both poet and friend, in the pure and lofty strains 
of which the two are linked in love and fate. During 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 77 


the ten years of silence from ’32 to ’42, when his genius 
was maturing its power, and his soul was working 
through the problems of sin and suffering to childlike 
trust, he was much in London and had the close friend- 
ship of such men as Cunningham, Carlyle, Gladstone, 
Mill, Thackeray, Forster, Sterling, Landor, Macready. 
And later came the rich friendship of Browning and 
Palgrave, Jowett and Argyle. The most distinguished 
literary and scientific men in England were his friends. 
And he opened his heart especially to men in the Church 
or without who had new light to throw upon the prob- 
lems of life and destiny. His homes at Farringford 
and Aldworth were open to his friends, and here hun- 
dreds were welcomed with simple and genuine hos- 
pitality. 

His warm and generous friendships were expression 
of a heart that beat true for all men. He was hailed 
at first by a select few and this by the richness and 
strangeness of his melody. But it was not the mind 
of Tennyson to be the pet of the drawing-room. He 
soon worked free from such misconception. He let the 
world know that he felt for “men the workers, men 
my brothers.” He agreed with Mazzini that “nothing 
in this world is so contemptible as a literary coterie.” 
He always delighted in the “central roar’ of London, 
and the first thing he did on entering the city was to 
walk the Strand and feel the touch of common life. As 
young men, he and Arthur Hallam often discussed the 
problems of the poor. “The unsettled condition of the 
country, and the misery of the poorer class weighed 
upon them. It seemed difficult to young men, starting 
in life, to know how to remedy these evils, but they 
determined not to lose hold of the real in seeking the 
ideal.” Hallam writes, “When the ideas of time and 


78 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


sorrow are not, and sway not the soul with power, then 
is no true knowledge in Poetry or Philosophy.” 

He sympathized with every rational effort for larger 
life for men. He rang the Church bells at midnight 
on the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, much to 
the horror of the Tory rector who had followed his 
father. He could not bear any haughty spirit towards 
the poor or superciliousness towards their efforts for 
liberty. Dean Bradley of Westminster Abbey describes 
a garden party, where, after eating plentifully of 
peaches, some one to a remark about the possible dis- 
agreement of the fruit replies jocularly about “the 
disturbed districts,” alluding of course to some disor- 
ders apprehended or existing in the centers of industry. 
“TI remember being startled by your father’s voice and 
accent, ‘I can’t joke about so grave a question,’ and 
thinking to myself that it was exactly what one so dif- 
ferent as Dr. Arnold might have said under similar cir- 
cumstances.” He always had special care about cour- 
tesy to the poor, and the severest punishment he ever 
gave his son was for want of respect to one of the 
servants. 

The humanity of Tennyson gives his poems their 
universal note. He sings of the common loves and 
hopes and struggles of men. He pictures the heroic 
element of common life. He lifts the heart to the 
great thoughts of home and country and God. 


He sings of what the world will be 
When the years have died away. 


And so he helps men everywhere. A Gordon shut up 
in Khartum can say, “The reading of Tennyson has 
been my great relief,’ and a poor workman unable to 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 79 


buy the volumes learns some of the poems by heart 
and repeats them for support in toil. He is the poet 
of the people. 


Plowmen, shepherds have I found, and more than once, and 
still could find, 
Sons of God and Kings of men in utter nobleness of mind. 


And Tennyson never lost this sympathy with the peo- 
ple. He constantly turned the conversation to the 
problems of society. He was especially interested in 
efforts at industrial cooperation. He did not the least 
mind if England, when the people are less ignorant and 
more experienced in self-government, eventually be- 
comes a democracy. But he feared violent, selfish, 
unreasoning democracy. And sometimes when he saw 
society, vicious, and the poor starving in great cities, 
he felt as though a mighty wave of evil were passing 
over the world. It might be expected that the poet 
of the second Locksley Hall would have a soberer vision 
and more conservative spirit than the fiery youth of 
twenty-two whose watchword was 


Forward, forward, let us range, 
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves 
of change. 


The word of progress he is still willing to use, but with 
a higher meaning. He looks forward, but upward also. 


Lame and old and past his time and passing now into the 
night ; 

Yet I would the rising race were half as eager for the 
light, 


80 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Mr. Tennyson was a deeply religious man, not reli- 
gious in the sense of devotion to creed or Church,— 
of these he was not unmindful,—but religious in the 
more spiritual sense that his whole life was dominated 
by the thought of God. Men are really tested by their 
unconscious moments, that is, in the moments when 
the mind released from the tension of work, like an 
unbent bow springs back to its normal state. What 
are the feelings of men, what do they think about in 
these informal, unguarded moments? Here is revealed 
the real disposition of man. And by this sure test 
Mr. Tennyson stands out as a God-possessed man. 
With his friends, sooner or later he talked about the 
deeper problems of the soul. In his letters and journals 
the most significant things are questions of religion. 
Writing of the mechanic influence of the age and its 
tendency to crush and overpower the spiritual in man, 
he says, ‘““What matters it how much man knows and 
does if he keeps not a reverential looking upward? 
He is only the subtlest beast in the field.” “I hate utter 
unfaith,” he would say. “I cannot endure that men 
should sacrifice everything at the cold altar of what 
with their imperfect knowledge they choose to call 
truth and reason. One can easily lose all belief, through 
giving up the continual thought and care for spiritual 
things.” | 

“He had a sympathy with those who were impa- 
tient of the formal statement of truth, only because 
he felt that all formal statements of truth must of 
necessity fall below the greatness and the grandeur of 
the truth itself.” So he was comprehensive in sympa- 
thies, trying to find the basis of all religion, in the 
spiritual nature of man, convinced that if men would 
stand together on this primal and simple basis, they 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 81 


would be soon found together in their practical alle- 
giance to Christianity. So the main testimony to Chris- 
tianity was not in miracles, but in that eternal witness, 
the revelation of what might be called the mind of 
God in the Christian morality and its correlation with 
the divine in man. At the same time he would say 
that Christianity with its divine morality but without 
the central figure of Christ, the Son of Man, would be- 
come cold, and that the spiritual character of Christ is 
more wonderful than the greatest miracle. The Duke 
of Argyle declares Tennyson the man of the noblest 
humility he had ever known. “It was not that he was 
unconscious of his own powers or indifferent to the 
appreciation of others.” But it was that he was far 
more continually conscious of the limitations upon them 
in face of those problems of the universe with which 
in thought he was continually dealing. In his inner 
spirit he seemed to me to be always feeling his own 
later words: 


But what am I? 

An infant crying in the night: 
An infant crying for the light: 
And with no language but a cry. 


Tennyson’s father was gifted and versatile, a clergy- 
man, poet, artist, musician, scientist, and from him no 
doubt he inherited much of his genius. His mother 
was no less remarkable for the depth and purity of her 
piety, and it is the influence of mother and home, and 
his own home and wife no less, that make his poems 
the constant idealization of womanhood and the beauty 
and purity of wedded love. And he confessed that he 
referred to his own mother in the words of “The 
Princess”: 


82 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Happy he 
With such a mother! faith in womankind 
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high 
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall 
He shall not blind his soul with clay. 


There is a beautiful letter from this mother, written 
in her old age, that is really a prayer for her son: 
“How fervently have I prayed for years that our 
merciful Redeemer would intercede with our Heavenly 
Father, to grant thee His Holy Spirit to urge thee to 
employ the talents He has given thee by taking every 
opportunity of endeavoring to impress the precepts of 
His Holy Word on the minds of others. My beloved 
son, words are too feeble to express the joy of my 
heart in perceiving that thou art earnestly endeavoring 
to do so.” 

One can see that the mother’s prayer was abun- 
dantly answered as the attempt is made to trace the 
development of Tennyson’s work through the years. 
The first poems of 1827 (the two brothers) when he 
was eighteen, are full of melody, but with only faint 
prophecies of his spiritual insight. The first volume 
of his own poems, 1830, the second year at Cambridge, 
containing such poems as “Lilian,” “Marian,” “The 
Poet,” illustrate the first characteristics of his genius, 
an exquisite sense of the charms of sound and rhythm 
based on an earnest capacity for sober thought. The 
second volume, 1832, containing “The Lady of Shalott,” 
“The Lotus Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” and “A 
Dream of Fair Women,” shows the same fine regard for 
melody but a greater desire to build on worthy thought. 
“The Palace of Art” is the sin of a self-centered soul 
and strikes the note that grows richer and fuller that 
life should move in the love of truth, the truth of love. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 83 


The ten years of silence, under the shadow of a great 
affliction, were God’s discipline for a spiritual prophet. 
The volume of 1842, containing such poems as “Locks- 
ley Hall,’ “Ulysses,” “The Two Voices,” “Sir Gala- 
had,” ‘The Vision of Sin,’ shows how his comprehen- 
sion of human life had grown. Chivalry, duty, rever- 
ence, human passion, simple faith, the many complex 
moods of the religious nature were dealt with without 
“any brooding self-absorption.” “It was the Humani- 
ties and the truths underlying them that he sang, and 
he so sang them that any deep-hearted reader was made 
to feel through his far-reaching thought that those 
Humanities are spiritual things, and that to touch them 
is to touch the garment of the Divine.” Then followed 
one after another the noble works on which his fame 
chiefly rests: “The Princess,” with lines that haunt the 
memory and songs as sweet as our tongue contains, 
and in the discussion of woman the example of his 
intellectual and spiritual sensitiveness to life-themes and 
his clear and brave vision of truth; “In Memoriam,” 
the analytical study of the psychology of sorrow and 
the most religious poem since “‘Paradise Lost” ; “Maud,” 
the antiphonal voice to “In Memoriam”; “The Idylls 
of the King,” the epic of Christian chivalry; “Mary,” 
“Harold,” and “Becket,” the trilogy of English his- 
torical drama. In his last volume, “The Death of 
CEnone,” we expect to read: 


Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human 
state, 

Fear not thou the hidden purpose of that Power Who alone 
is great, 

Nor the myriad world, His shadow, nor the silent opener 
of the gate. 


84 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


His genius and his faith were both full to the end, and 
as he passed from earth in the flood of moonlight 
that filled the room and covered the great landscape 
outside, the watchers felt that his last word had been 
realized : 


Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me! 

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea; 


But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 

When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home. 


Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark! 

And may there be no sadness of farewell, 
When I embark; 


For though from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 

I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

When I have crossed the bar. 


The poet of his youth was 


Bravely furnished all abroad to fling 
The winged shafts of truth. 


And one couplet of the second “Locksley Hall,” written 
fifty-six years later, and put on the tablet to the mem- 
ory of the poet’s son, Lionel Tennyson, is the poetic 
embodiment of the Laureate’s life: 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 85 


Truth—for truth is truth—he worshipped, being true as he 
was brave. 

Good—for good is good—he followed, yet he looked be- 
yond the grave. 


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CHAPTER V 
In Memoriam: The Way of Fatth 


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CHAPTER V 
IN MEMORIAM: THE WAY OF FAITH 


The last chapter showed the nature and training of 
Tennyson as the preparation of a great poet, and espe- 
cially for his interpretation of the spiritual life of 
man. 

This interpretation is constantly made. Whatever the 
subject, he is inclined to reveal the very spirit of life. 
But it is most notable in two groups of poems, (1) the 
series of epics that are called “The Idylls of the King,” 
and (2) in the lyrics that are gathered into “In Memo- 
riam.” 

In the “Idylls’” he takes the elementary virtues of 
men, integrity, endurance, honor, loyalty, represented in 
the persons and acts of early chivalry, touches them 
with a Christian light, and lifts them like a banner 
against a self-loving, deceptive, materialistic age. He 
felt that a lofty example that would touch the true 
pride of race and make conscience king was the great 
need of the world. 

In “In Memoriam” he brought the faith of men to 
the test of the growing scientific and philosophical 
knowledge of nature and life, and connected the claims 
of Christianity with the problems of our daily expe- 
rience. 

Such is the spiritual meaning of “In Memoriam.” 
It is the path experience takes to reach faith in immor- 
tality. 

89 


go 


THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Break, break, break, 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! 

And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 


* 2 * * * 


Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! 

But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me. 


Such was Tennyson in 1833, pouring forth in plain- 


tive tones the sorrows of his widowed heart. His na- 
ture seemed to be overborne by grief. The only use 
of his art, the only expression of his life to utter the 
sad thoughts that arose in his heart. 


Seventeen years pass and a different song is heard 


from his lips, a hymn of calm and triumphant faith: 


Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
Whom we that have not seen Thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove; 


* 2K 2 x * 


Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood Thou. 

Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine. 


These songs, the first of personal grief, its unlight- 


ened thought bent down upon the earth and its mourn- 
ful cadences, the second turned upward to the Lord 
of Love and outward to the larger hope for mankind, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY gli 


stand as the landmarks of spiritual progress, the begin- 
ning and the end of that deep soul-experience whose 
perfected poetic expression is “In Memoriam.” 

Poetic tributes to friendship are apt to be narrow 
in theme and brief in influence. A life that has been 
kindred to one soul may be stranger to the multitude, 
and the note of sorrow or religious sentiment easily 
falls into wearisome routine. 

The fact that “In Memoriam,” the longest monody 
of English poetry, the most distinctly religious poem 
since “Paradise Lost,’ has constantly grown since the 
day of publication, 1850, to the present in thoughtful 
appreciation and profound influence until it seems at 
last to be, in the words of the poet himself, “the voice 
of the human race speaking through him,” shows the 
greatness of Tennyson’s genius and the interpretive 
power of his spirit. 

“In Memoriam’ is perhaps the richest oblation ever 
offered by the affection of friendship at the tomb of 
the departed,” is the early judgment of Gladstone. And 
thirty years later, 1889, we read such words as these 
from the well-known Dante student Thomas Davidson : 
“Though I have been familiar with the poem from 
boyhood, it is only in the last few years that the full 
import of that problem and of the noble solution offered 
by the poet has become clear to me. The work, as I 
now understand it, seems to me not only the greatest 
English poem of the century,—which I have always 
believed,—but one of the great world-poems, worthy 
to be placed on the same list with the ‘Oresteia,’ the 
‘Divina commedia’ and ‘Faust.’”’ ( Prolog.) 

“In Memoriam” demands our study for its relation 
to the growth of the poet’s genius; for its relation to 
the philosophic and religious movements of the age; 


g2 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


and for its attempted solution of the deepest and most 
vital problems of the human heart. 


I 


THE RELATION OF “IN MEMORIAM” TO THE POET’S 
GROWTH 


The immediate effect of the publication of “In Memo- 
riam” in 1850 was to direct study to the earlier poems 
of Mr. Tennyson for promise and growth of the power 
now manifested. 

We have seen that in the earliest poems there was a 
basis of earnest thought, often covered by the artistic 
richness of coloring and melody, “the dainty finish, the 
minute painting of mosses and flowers, and the super- 
subtle shading of emotions.” In 1842 the ten years of 
silence were broken by more manly notes. There is 
the same lyric freedom, the same delicacy of imagina- 
tion, the same artistic choice of words. But strength 
is no longer concealed: it grasps and vitalizes all. 
Touch after touch has brought out the picture of “The 
Palace of Art,” the sin of the self-centered soul. In 
“The Two Voices” and “The Vision of Sin,” he deals 
with the crisis-experience of the soul; the significance 
of temptation and suffering, the reality of goodness, 
the mysteries of life and death; and he meets them 
with earnest and manly contentions for victory. He 
is no less the artist, but is more the man, the man with 
the prophet’s vision and sympathy. He has learned 
the lowly lessons of the “cot in the vale,” the lessons 
of human need and struggle. He can write such virile 
poems as “Ulysses”: 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 93 
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 


He is profoundly stirred by the problems of the race. 
He is no longer, even unwittingly, the voice of a petted 
and select few, but the voice of the generation. He 
has learned to feel with 


Men, my brothers, men, the workers; 


to care for all that touches their welfare; to rejoice in 
the triumphs of true liberty; to thunder in scorn and 
wrath against the social tyrannies that crush the souls 
of men, and 


The social lies that warp us from the living truth. 


In such poems as “The Princess” he had revealed the 
“good at the heart of endless agitation,” and struck the 
chord of social consciousness and hope. 


Then comes the statlier Eden back to men: 
Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm: 
Then springs the crowning race of humankind. 


How are we to account for this growth, intensive and 
extensive, in depth of thought and sweep of sympathy? 
It is not solely the result of conscientious study and 
honest self-criticism, though no poet has ever made 
himself more the master of the history and art of his 
calling. It is not simply the natural growth of the 
“great and deep strength” with which he was dowered, 
the unfolding of the principles of thought and conduct 
in which he was bred, rich and noble as both these were. 
Forces beyond his choice and control also had to do 


94 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


with his training. “God calls his noblemen from the 
highlands of trial.” 

The words at the head of the poem, “In Memoriam, 
A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII”’ reveal the secret of 
the profoundest changes in the thought and work of the 
poet. 

Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam, fellow- 
students at Trinity College, Cambridge, were kindred 
spirits, aspiring, poetic natures, and grew together with 
the love 


More than my brothers are to me. 


It was the wish of Tennyson to publish his volume of 
poems (1830) jointly with his friend Hallam after the 
example of the “Lyrical Ballads” of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge. They were rivals for the same college hon- 
ors without envy, and went everywhere “joined and 
inseparable.” It was Hallam who believed in the genius 
of his friend, and published the first favorable criticism 
of his poems. All unite in the praise of the pure and 
promising career of young Hallam. 


High nature amorous of the good, _ 
But touch’d with no ascetic gloom. 


His sudden death in Vienna in 1833, while on a tour 
of the Continent with his father, the distinguished his- 
torian, was a terrible shock to Tennyson and left an 
abiding impression upon his nature. 


Behold the man that loved and lost, 
But all he was is overworn. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 95 


Seventeen years passed before love and sorrow received 
its last and highest expression in “In Memoriam” ; 
years of questioning and conflict, of upreaching and 
growth; years of “dull hopeless misery and rebellion, 
passing up to the dawn of hope, acquiescent trust and 
calm happiness.” Suffering had forced the soul to 
“front the realities of our mysterious life’ and many 
a question had been raised and answered. 

As early as 1842 others saw the changed art and 
traced the cause. “Much has he thought, much suf- 
fered,’ writes Margaret Fuller, “since the first ecstasy 
of so fine an organization clothed all the world in rosy 
light. He has not suffered himself to become a mere 
intellectual voluptuary, nor the songster of passion and 
fancy, but has earnestly revolved the problems of life 
and his conclusions are calmly noble.” And Carlyle 
calls him “a right valiant, true-fighting, victorious 
heart,’ and calls upon all other men to be thankful 
and joyful for the “note of eternal melodies in this 
man.” And we have the poet’s own testimony to the 
deepened change in the fifth and sixth stanzas of the 
Epilogue: 


Regret is dead, but love is more 
Than in the summers that are flown, 
For I myself with these have grown 
To something greater than before; 
Which makes appear the songs I made 
As echoes out of weaker times, 
As half but idle brawling rhymes, 
The sport of random sun and shade. 


It may be said that suffering had its true influence upon 
a noble life, in opening the poet’s soul to the manifold 


96 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


voices of truth, in making his nature sensitive to the 
conflicting forces and problems of the generation. 


My pulses therefore beat again 
For other friends that once I met: 
Nor can it suit me to forget 

The mighty hopes that make us men. 


II 


In the opening chapter, the creative forces of the cen- 
tury were given, that would inspire poetry. Now it 
is well briefly to suggest the particular relation of “In 
Memoriam” to these forces, to the philosophic and 
religious movements of the generation. 

There is no more vital or germinant epoch in the 
history of English thought than from 1825 to 1845. 
The application of invention to steam and electricity 
was revolutionizing industry. The deeper study of 
science, in both nature and man, was leading to new 
theories of life and of human progress. The philosophic 
mind of Germany was quickening that of England. It 
was the age of the Reform Bill, the age of political 
and social and religious agitations. In the language of 
John Morley: “A great wave of humanity, of benevo- 
lence, of desire for improvement, a great wave of social 
sentiment, in short, poured itself among all who had 
the faculty of large and disinterested thinking.” 

Coleridge was the first and most directive mind of 
the epoch. In his “Aids to Reflection” he makes his 
appeal to the spiritual consciousness of men and insists 
upon the certitude of faith. Arnold and Whately, his 
disciples, were instruments for enlarging the traditional 
views of the Scriptures and the Church and for bring- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 97 


ing men to feel that the spiritual life consisted of daily 
contact with the Divine Spirit rather than adherence to 
particular form or party. And Christianity has shown 
a nobler spirit ever since. 

It is the spirit of the larger intellectual and spiritual 
freedom that speaks in Tennyson. 


Our little systems have their day: 
They have their day and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of Thee, 
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 


It is the Coleridgian distinction between knowledge and 
faith that meets us in “In Memoriam”: the reassertion 
of the spiritual nature of man that says of knowledge: 


What is she, cut from love and faith, 
But some wild Pallas from the brain 
Of Demos? ... 

She is the second, not the first. 

For she is earthly, of the mind, 

But wisdom heavenly, of the soul. 


Carlyle was a member with Tennyson of the Sterling 
Club and a lifelong friend, and they constantly dis- 
cussed the most vital questions. As to historical Chris- 
tianity I suppose it must be confessed that Carlyle’s 
influence is largely negative; but he hated shams, and 
made direct appeal to conscience and had faith in the 
worth of man’s intuitions. “In all human hearts there 
is the religious fiber,’ he would say, and so in a wide 
sense he was a spiritual teacher and made a wider place 
for religion in literature and in life. He was a prophet 
especially to a group of young men who “were deter- 
mined to have done with insincerity, to find ground 


98 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


under their feet, to let the uncertain remain uncertain, 
but to learn how much and what we could honestly 
regard as true.” And nowhere is this feeling of honest 
and fearless search more truly expressed than by 
Tennyson. 


You tell me doubt is devil-born. 


I know not: one indeed I knew 
In many a subtle question versed, 
Who touch’d a jarring lyre at first, 
But ever strove to make it true; 


Perplex’d in faith, but pure in deeds, 

At last he beat his music out. 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds. 


Opposed to these idealists, these teachers of spiritual 
consciousness, stands another friend of Tennyson, John 
Stuart Mill, the sensationist and necessitarian. Holding 
that necessity sways man and nature, that the senses 
are the sole source of knowledge, he denied intuition, 
refused to believe the mind anything more than refined 
matter, and did not, except in moments of inconsistent 
feeling, find the idea of God possible in the universe. 
It is useless to deny Mill’s influence in modern thought. 
It is the philosophy of George Eliot’s fiction and Her- 
bert Spencer’s essays. To be sure, it has lost something 
of the baldness of its denial, but is none the less anti- 
spiritual under the milder garb of the agnostic. 


Tennyson would not make his judgment blind; 
He faced the spectres of the mind. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 99 


He could state the baldest postulates of materialism and 
in the shadow of his sorrow he felt the chill of their 
merciless logic. He makes Nature say: 


Thou makest thine appeal to me: 

I bring to life, I bring to death: 

The spirit does but mean the breath: 
I know no more. 


But his heart revolts against the denials of the 
spiritual nature. 


And he, shall he 
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair, 
Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies, 
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, 


Who trusted God was love indeed 
And love creation’s final law— 
Though nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravin, shrieked against his creed— 


Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills, 
Who battled for the True, the Just, 
Be blown about the desert dust, 

Or seal’d within the iron hills? 


No more? A monster then, a dream, 
A discord. Dragons of the prime, 
That tare each other in their slime, 

Were mellow music match’d with him. 

O Life as futile, then, as frail! 


In the conflict of systems the softening of traditional 
views, the fourth decade of the century marks a transi- 


100 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


tion. The religious formalism on the one hand, the 
skeptical languor on the other, were broken by two 
groups of men: the Oxford movement against the so- 
called progress of thought by exalting the authority of 
the Church, High-Church; the other (which might al- 
most be called the Cambridge movement) or the Broad 
Church group, accepting new light from every source, 
made religion real and vital by renewing its forms and 
its service with the spirit of Christ. 

Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley 
were the soul of this stronger and broader religious life. 
Maurice was the theologian, the teacher, the prophet: 
Kingsley the poet, the novelist, the preacher : both eager 
in their search for truth, open-minded, loyal to their 
conviction. They cared not for the honor of men and 
carried their loftiest visions into the commonest duties. 
Their peculiar influence it seems to me was in the 
enlarging the sphere of spiritual life. 

Tennyson, the devoted friend of Maurice and Kings- 
ley, having like all who knew him well a peculiar 
reverence for Maurice and calling him his religious 
Master, was powerfully affected by this religious tend- 
ency; more than this, he gave to it the power of the 
noblest poetic form. 

“Strong Son of God, Immortal Love” may be taken 
as the very keynote of the movement; and the closing 
verse of “In Memoriam” is the best summary of its 
thought: 


That God, which ever lives and loves, 
One God, one law, one element, 
And one far-off divine event, 

To which the whole creation moves, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY tor 


Thus we see that “In Memoriam” is the articulation 
of the age-spirit in religion. So true is it, that we find 
the very words of the poem are constantly used: they 
have become the language of the noblest thought and 
hope of the age. 


IIT 


Now we turn to the most important questions of the 
poem, its purpose, its outline of thought, and its treat- 
ment of those religious truths which “every thinking 
man is trying to connect with his every-day experience.” 

“In Memoriam” in the first and simplest view is a 
lament for a friend and as such it has often suggested 
comparison with the two other great elegies of English 
poetry, the ‘““Lycidas” of Milton and the “Adonais”’ of 
Shelley. They are similar in subject, the sorrow for the 
loss of a dear friend cast off in youth: they are alike in 
the causes of sorrow, the loss of companionship, the 
withheld completion of life. But with this formal and 
outward comparison, the likeness ends. ‘“Lycidas” and 
“Adonais” speak in classic form; “In Memoriam” in 
the person of the poet, direct and simple. The poems of 
Milton and Shelley are consistent and complete elegies, 
throughout the mourning for the dead: the poem of 
Tennyson is elegiac only in the beginning: it makes 
sorrow but the starting-point for the discussion of the 
mysteries of life and death. 

The comparison is sometimes made between “In 
Memoriam” and the sonnets of Shakspere, suggested by 
the thought evidently in Tennyson’s mind in the lines 


I loved thee spirit, and love, nor can 
The soul of Shakspere love thee more. 


102 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


The parallelism is superficial. The sonnets of Shak- 
spere picture a love that is earthly, and touched with 
earth’s sin and shame. But in “In Memoriam” love is 
idealized, fixed beyond estrangement and hallowed by 
death. 

Mr. Thomas Davidson has made a still more striking 
comparison with the work of Dante: “ ‘In Memoriam’ 
is the record of the shattering and rebuilding of a moral 
world in a man’s soul. It belongs to the same class 
of works as the ‘Divine Comedy’ and ‘Faust’: only 
whereas the first of these is epic and the second dra- 
matic, this is lyric. The hero of ‘In Memoriam,’ like 
the hero of the ‘Divine Comedy,’ is the poet himself. 
Both poems are idealized records of actual experiences. 
In both the person beloved dies young, leaving the lover 
for a time utterly desolate. In both cases this desola- 
tion, instead of overwhelming the lover, finally quickens 
his spiritual perceptions, so that he is able to find in 
the spiritual world what he has lost in the material. 
In both cases, a pure, reverent human love leads the 
soul of the lover up to God. Dante finds again his lost 
Beatrice in the imaginary paradise of his time: Tenny- 
son finds his Arthur ‘mix’d with God and nature.’ 
In both poems the fundamental thought is the same: 
man’s true happiness consists in the perfect conformity 
of his will with the Divine will, and this conformity 
is attained through love, first of man and then of God.” 

Many analyses of “In Memoriam’ have been pub- 
lished in this country and in England. Professor 
Davidson’s is perhaps the most philosophical and inter- 
pretive; Professor Genung’s the most elaborate and 
minute. No one can work his way through the second 
without arriving at a finer appreciation of the poem. 
The trouble with it, however, is that no such unity 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY _ 103 


of elaborate design was in the mind of the poet. We 
find from the life of Tennyson that the 131 separate 
poems that have been gathered into “In Memoriam” 
were written at different times through the seventeen 
years, each with no thought of publication as a collected 
whole, simply the natural and necessary expression of 
his heart, lest the “o’erfraught heart should break,” each 
written at the suggestion of some natural object or 
recurring anniversary, or memory of his friend, or the 
phase of feeling, the expression of growing experience 
of the problem of death and suffering, its effect upon 
the individual and so its work for society. 

These were written without thought of a whole, and 
so without definite plan. No doubt the Divine Spirit 
whom his devout mother invoked for his aid, no doubt 
the Immortal Love whom the Poet himself invokes to 
forgive his sin and grief, 


—his wild and wandering cries, 
Confessions of a wasted youth, 


to 


Forgive them where they fail in truth, 
And in Thy wisdom make them wise 


were answered in directing the soul and voice of the 
poet to a goal he could not wholly foresee. He was led 
by faith. There is a unity in the poem: it is found in 
the immortality of love, that holds the soul true through 
the storm and stress of sorrow and doubt, and brings 
it forth into a peaceful land, where a heavenly glory 
dwells and men take heart for a nobler future for 
themselves and for mankind. And so the poem is a 
devout guide to rational faith. 


104 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


The only plan that Tennyson himself would admit 
is the simple division formed by the three Christmas 
seasons, at poems 28, 78, 104. This gives “In Memo- 
riam” an introduction, 1-28, and three divisions or 
cycles. And it is not hard to find certain things in each 
cycle that seem to be characteristic, to trace certain 
steps of experience that seem to mark the onward move- 
ment of the whole. 

The impression of the first cycle, 28-78, is found in 
“the aimless moods of sorrow,” and the momentary 
gleams of hope darkened by doubt. Its prevailing tone 
is that of grief. The very poems are a “sad mechanic 
exercise” by which he would try to numb his pain. 


In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er 
Like coarsest clothes against the cold. 


Arthur loved to speak of divine things, but human grief 
dims the eye. The fact that we do not forget, lose our 
personality in sleep, does it not suggest that death may 
be only a sleep? But men want not a sleep, an absorp- 
tion into the all, but a conscious life hereafter. What 
value in the mere fact of the life hereafter unless we 
are sure of its blessedness? Here is the terrible fact of 
evil. Who would care for an immortality of sin? Is 
there not hope that evil itself is a discipline and far off 
may be turned into good? Before these mysterious 
problems, we are but children crying in the night. 
Though we have no language but a cry, the desire for 
the future good of all is the most divine thing in us. 
Is it a ray of the divine light? Nature cannot tell us, 
she is callous to these motions of the human spirit. 
Though mystery enwraps the holy of holies, he would 
not choose other than his manhood, in spite of its sin 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 10s 


and suffering. He can feel the helpful influence of his 
love and sorrow. 


I hold it true, whate’er befall; 
I feel it when I sorrow most; 
*Tis better to have loved and lost 
Than never to have loved at all. 


It opens the avenues of his life and makes him more 
human. 


The shade by which my life was crost, 
Which makes a desert in my mind, 
Has made me kindly with my kind, 

And like to him whose light is lost. 


Though the sight of man is dim and he cannot follow 
his friend, he cannot think of him as dead. He is ever 
present in waking thoughts and dreams of the night. 
His very grief is a measure of his friend’s greatness, 
and somewhere that greatness must be doing its work. 
However sad and unanswerable the mystery of death, 
he will cherish his love, and will sing his song. 

The second cycle, 78-104, shows the influence of time 
upon sorrow, the gradual lifting of the mists, so that 
some glory falls upon the world, and the pleasures of 
nature blend with the deeper voices of the soul. 

He longs to see his friend with bodily eyes. This he 
knows cannot be granted; it must be a vision of the 
spirit. And the vision of the spirit can only be given 
to the calm and pure spirit. And so the gradual change 
is indicated, of which Nature herself is the symbol. 
The anniversary of Hallam’s death is not stormy as be- 
fore, but calm and beautiful. When the soul is prepared 


106 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


in quietness, faith with new vigor drives back the 
coward doubts and in mystic vision 


The dead man touch’d me from the past, 
And all at once it seem’d at last 
The living soul was flash’d on mine. 


To the poet, the vision is foretaste and prophecy of 
the life immortal. 

The last cycle, 104-131, has a different tone. It turns 
from personal experience to the world’s need and hope. 
From the opening lines : 


Long sleeps the summer in the seed; 
Run out your measured arcs, and lead 
The closing cycle rich in good, 


it moves with calmer and steadier step to 


the crowning race 
Of those that eye to eye shall look 
On Knowledge: .. . 


For all we thought and loved and did, 
And hoped, and suffer’d is but seed 
Of what in them is flower and fruit. 


Grief must not be cherished as the luxury of love. 
Overmuch grief must be silenced; it must make us 
wise, if our work is to be done and the happier day 
come. So Tennyson turns to society and human prog- 
ress; he sings the Christ that is to be. How much 
Arthur would have done with his “heart-affluence in 
discursive talk,” his “seraphic intellect and force to seize 
and throw the doubts of man,” his “impassioned logic, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 107 


which outran the hearer in its fiery course.” If the 
world has lost so much, the poet must not fail to do his 
part. 


All these have been, and thee mine eyes 
Have look’d on: if they look’d in vain, 
My shame is greater who remain, 

Nor let thy wisdom make me wise. 


The evolution of earth and man suggest immortality, 
the crowning work of time, else evolution itself is 
meaningless. Each life must be a type and force of 
this higher progress. Amidst the mighty cosmic forces, 
the one abiding thing is the spirit, and the life of the 
spirit is love. Not by effort of the understanding do we 
apprehend God, but by the love of the heart; and that’s 
what St. John said. He who cries after God shall feel 
Him. The faith that clings to Arthur is the faith that 
worketh by love through human struggles and hopes, 
working out the divine plan of a nobler race. 

The poet that invoked Immortal Love in the begin- 
ning of his song, sings at its close, 


Love is and was my Lord and King; 
and the prayer-hymn rises as the meaning of the years: 


O living will that shalt endure 
When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
Rise in the spiritual rock, 

Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure, 


That we may lift from out of dust 

A voice as unto him that hears, 

A cry above the conquered years 
To one that with us works, and trust, 


108 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


With faith that comes of self-control, 
The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved, 

And all we flow from, soul in soul. 


There are three characteristics that give “In Memo- 
riam’’ its message to the soul of our generation,—the 
wonderful realism of its psychology of sorrow, its 
fearless but reverent facing the mysteries around and 
beyond us, and the triumphant faith possible for a life 
that will trust and follow the motions of its spiritual 
nature. 

Only a life that in some degree has suffered as Tenny- 
son did can know how faithful he is to the faintest 
motions of the soul in sorrow. The life of the world 
that breaks in upon our states of grief like far-away 
noise, the worthlessness of the attempted comfort that 
loss is common, the something of standing “where he 
in English earth is laid,” the “vain pretense” of Christ- 
mas cheer, the converse about the loved and lost, taking 


the grasses of the grave, 
And make them pipes whereon to blow, 


the life that almost dies, “that dies not, but endures with 
pain,” the firmer mind, slowly forming, 


Treasuring the look it can not find, 
The words that are not heard again ;— 


such pictures (and there are many others), are a mirror 
in which the mourner salutes his very soul. 

Mr. Tennyson frankly acknowledged the difficulty 
that many earnest minds have over religious belief. He 
does not minimize or qualify the questionings of skep- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY tog 


tical science. He is faithful in following truth though 
it seem to contradict some of his cherished hopes, though 
it lead from beaten path of men to untrod ways. He 
has a true humility as the only attitude for the human 
soul that knows the finite can by no means grasp the 
infinite. This sincerity to the deepest depth makes the 
power of Tennyson in dealing with earnest and ques- 
tioning souls. ‘“Wordsworth’s attitude towards nature 
was one that left science unregarded: the nature for 
which Wordsworth stirred our feelings was nature as 
known by simple observation and interpreted by re- 
ligious and sympathetic intuition. But for Tennyson 
the physical world is always the world as known to us 
through physical science ; the scientific view of it domi- 
nates his thoughts about it; and his general acceptance 
of this view is real and sincere, even when he utters the 
intensest feeling of its inadequacy to satisfy our deepest 
needs.” 

Professor Sidgwick speaks of the “unparalleled 
combination of intensity of feeling with comprehensive- 
ness of view and balance of judgment, shown in pre- 
senting the deepest needs and perplexities of humanity.” 
Tennyson was troubled by the lavish profusion in the 
natural world, the apparent waste of life, and by the 
vast amount of sin and suffering in the world, and he 
confessed that they seemed to militate against the idea 
of the omnipotent and all-loving Father. “Yet God 
is love,” he would exclaim after one of these moods. 
“We do not get this faith from nature or the world. 
If we look at nature alone, full of perfection and imper- 
fection, she tells us that God is disease, murder, rapine. 
We get this faith from ourselves, from what is highest 
within us, which recognizes that there is not one fruit- 
less pang, just as there is not one lost good.” He does 


110 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


not meet the atheistic tendencies of modern science 
with more confident defiance, but by appeal to those 
high instincts, those “questionings of sense and outward 
things” which are the witness of the spiritual nature. 

And this brings us to the last thought, the victory of 
his faith and how he saves faith for questioning souls. 
He wins victory for himself and so for other tempted 
souls by cherishing the love and trust and hope of his 
spiritual nature, by trying to keep his life free from 
worldliness, by patiently awaiting the unfoldings of 
God, by loyally doing and bearing what seems the will 
of God. He so trusts in eternal justice and love that a 
life in such an attitude will not be left in weakness and 
darkness. | 

Each realm of God has its own organs and methods 
of vision. The natural world is apprehended by the 
senses through observation. This is what men call 
knowledge. The spiritual world is apprehended by 
obedience, by love, by trust, and this is faith. There 
can be no real conflict between religion and science, 
faith and knowledge, if each will keep to its own sphere 
and method. “Let the scientific men stick to their 
science,’ he says one day in a friendly discussion with 
Froude and Tyndall, “and leave philosophy and religion 
to poets, philosophers, and theologians.” To him faith 
was the “faculty of the soul which enabled him to grasp 
truths inaccessible to understanding and knowledge, the 
very truths which are required to give life its meaning 
and consecration,” and he believed that the efficacy of 
faith depended upon the condition of the heart and the 
will. And so he taught that faith comes from self- 
control, that it has its source in reverence, that it is 
the protest of the heart against the “freezing reason’s 
colder part.” 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 111 


We have but faith: we can not know, 
For knowledge is of things we see; 
And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 

A beam in darkness: let it grow. 


Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell: 
That mind and soul, according well 

May make one music as before, 


But vaster. 


No doubt “In Memoriam” has had a certain “dissolv- 
ing” influence (to use the word of James Martineau) 
upon religious thought, that is, it has released it from 
the too tight propositions which have tried to define 
the Infinite. And in this process of release, some lives 
have pushed beyond the forms of faith and lost the 
faith itself. But they have not followed the spirit of 
Tennyson. “He has never for himself surrendered the 
traditional form of a devout faith, till he has seized its 
permanent spirit, and invested it with a purer glory; 
so has he saved it for others by making it fairer than 
they had dreamt. Among thousands of readers previ- 
ously irresponsible to anything Divine he has created, or 
immeasurably intensified, the susceptibility of religious 
reverence.” (Martineau.) 


I found Him not in world or sun, 
Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye: 
Nor thro’ the questions men may try, 
The petty cobwebs we have spun: 


If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep, 
I heard a voice “Believe no more,” 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 

That tumbled in the godless deep; 


II2 


THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


A warmth within the heart would melt 
The freezing reason’s colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answered, ‘I have felt.’ 


No, like a child in doubt and fear; 
But that blind clamour made me wise; 
Then was I as a child that cries, 
But crying, knows his father near; 


And what I am beheld again 

What is, and no man understands; 

And out of darkness came the hands 
That reach through nature, moulding men. 


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CHAPTER VI 
BROWNING’S INTERPRETATION OF LOVE 


Cannon Farrar in a lecture in this country said that 
the study of Robert Browning was equivalent to a 
liberal education. And it is not hard to see why this 
may be true. 

Browning was an omnivorous student, of all the great 
concerns of human interest, of the various fields of 
human thought, even more than Tennyson a profound 
student of man. For while there is always something 
insular and English about Tennyson, Mr. Browning is 
a man of the world, and is the first great exponent in 
English literature of the world-consciousness. So in 
studying Browning, one is brought into contact with 
many lands and times and persons. Such intercourse 
tends to a liberal culture. 

Mr. Browning is essentially a thinker; he is an in- 
terpreter of life, a philosopher before he is a poet; 
using his poetic genius, his power of penetrative insight, 
to see into the life of things, to pluck out the heart of 
the mystery; and he does this with such fertility, and 
originality, and often difficulty of thought and expres- 
sion as to quicken and develop any mind that will make 
his poetry a serious study. As Mr. Stedman says of 
“The Ring and the Book”: “The thought, the vocabu- 
lary, the imagery, the wisdom, lavished upon this story, 
would equip a score of ordinary writers, and place them 
beyond danger of neglect.” 


115 


116 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


And then Mr. Browning is essentially a religious 
philosopher, an ethical teacher more than a metaphysi- 
cian. He is the poet of the soul. He traces the inner 
processes of a life, hunting motives to the darkest hid- 
ing-places, laying open the motions of the heart, reveal- 
ing a man to himself, showing that “life’s business is 
just the terrible choice,” showing morality necessarily 
ever under the guise of warfare, God’s training of a 
soul. 

So the study of Browning means a truer knowledge 
of the soul, and a grasp after the relation of man to 
the world and to God, beside the training of a wide 
culture. In his journey to Australia, Henry Drummond 
took a complete set of Browning, and recorded in his 
journal, “None can approach Browning in insight into 
life, or even into Christianity.” 

No man has come so slowly to his kingdom as 
Browning. Like Tennyson his father was a poet, 
though of little achievement, and the boy was trained 
to be a poet from childhood. As a little boy of eight 
he walked around the dining-room table, spanning out 
the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth 
mahogany. As early as this he debated between poetry 
and painting as a life work, but he didn’t debate long, 
for it was only a moment’s wavering of the purpose 
that controlled his conscious life, as he himself puts 
it thirty-five years after: 


I shall never in the years remaining, 

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, 
Make you music that should all-express me: 
Verse alone, one life allows me. 


At twelve, he had poems enough for a volume, but tried 
in vain to get a publisher. Thus far he had been under 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 117 


the influence of Byron, and thought that feeling was 
the substance of poetry. But at thirteen, he found a 
mutilated copy of Shelley and soon was made passing 
rich with complete copies of Shelley and Keats, both 
poets dead and practically unknown to the British public. 
Then he began that training for a poet, in school and 
university, and in the wider school of life, by travel 
and study in many lands, in intercourse with many 
minds, that gave him something of Shakspere’s univer- 
sality. At twenty, he published “Pauline” anonymously. 
That was 1833, the year after Tennyson’s second vol- 
ume; but the poem was never acknowledged until 1867. 
Not a single copy was sold. The reviews ignored it or 
spoke contemptuously. Here and there a man like 
John Stuart Mill and John Forster and D. G. Rossetti 
read it and felt that a great soul was struggling for a 
voice. The next year four poems appeared in maga- 
zines, chief of them “Porphyria’s Lover,” and attracted 
no attention. A few copies of “Paracelsus” (1835), 
were sold but the reviews were still adverse. ‘Obscurity 
of Shelley minus his poetic beauty.” Though Brown- 
ing was gaining no public, he was making friends. 
Wordsworth hailed him as a brother poet. Macready 
the actor urged him to write for the stage, and in answer 
appeared the play of Strafford in 1837. “Pippa Passes” 
and “The Return of the Druses” were first written for 
the stage but found neither actor nor publisher. How- 
ever, the masculine mind of Mr. Browning was not 
disheartened by apparent failure. He returned to his 
early plan of chronicling in poetry the whole life of a 
soul, and “Sordello” was the outcome, appearing in 
1840, a poem that has been “an eminent stumbling- 
block, not merely in the path of fools, but in that of 
very sensible and cultivated people.” Mr. Gosse admits 


118 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


that it needs reading three times, but declares that “‘on 
a third, even a school-boy of tolerable intelligence will 
find it luminous, if not entirely lucid.” 

All the books thus far had been published at the 
expense of his father, and at added financial loss. 

From 1841 to 1846, under the general title of “Bells 
and Pomegranates,” cheap sheets of his poems were 
printed that first found anything like a reading public. 
“Pippa Passes” was the first that in any sense became 
popular. In this series is such variety as “My Last 
Duchess,” ‘In a Gondola,” ‘““A Blot on the ’Scutcheon,” 
“A Soul’s Tragedy,” “Evelyn Hope,” “Colombe’s Birth- 
day,” “The Pied Piper.” These are poems of lyric 
sweetness or fire, and others where the most exquisite 
charm and variety of music are fused with dramatic 
intensity. The incidents of outer action or the move- 
ments of the inner life of the soul are treated with 
ideality and harmony. The thought is in the highest 
sense poetic. This finished the first period of Mr. 
Browning’s development. 

Though most of Mr. Browning’s poems have the 
dramatic spirit, they are not many of them dramatic 
in form. There is no real acting and no real conversa- 
tions, but the thought is developed by a series of 
monologues. “I have ventured to display somewhat 
minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and 
have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and 
determined, to be generally discernible in its effects 
alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether 
excluded.” This was Browning’s true work, and after 
1846, the publication of his last drama, he gave himself 
to lyrics and dramatic monologues. From 1846 to 1864 
might be called the second and best period of his work. 
It covers almost two decades of the poet’s life, from 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY _ 119 


his thirty-fourth to his fifty-second year, when a man’s 
life is usually at the fullest. And the two volumes 
published during this period, “Men and Women” and 
“Dramatis Persone,’ contain the happiest and most 
varied expression of his power and are the culmination 
of his genius. 

“Andrea del Sarto,” “The Bishop Orders his Tomb,” 
“In a Balcony,” “James Lee’s Wife,” “Abt Vogler,” 
“Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “A Death in the Desert,” ‘“Pros- 
pice,” are the most significant of this collection, “that 
unfold a thought, and by this very thought, reveal a 
character.” In some cases, as “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” the 
thought is the chief thing and the character only hinted. 
In others, as “The Bishop Orders his Tomb,” the 
character is prominent and the thought is in the 
background. 

This also is the period of Mr. Browning’s married 
life. And one cannot doubt that the perfection of his 
work is due in part to the influence of Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning, who unquestionably is the first woman poet 
of the English language. Though her father never 
forgave Mr. Browning for carrying off his daughter, 
the marriage was a union of souls, a blessing in giving 
the world an example of pure wedded love and in 
developing two souls by a holy affection and so elevating 
their work and enriching our poetry. 

It is not only the time when lyric love shines the 
sweetest and purest, but when the spiritual insight into 
the truths of the soul and of God in his world of nature 
and of man has its most unerring expression. Mrs. 
Browning was his good star. 


All that I know 
Of a certain star 


120 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Is, it can throw 

(Like the angled spar) 

Now a dart of red, 

Now a dart of blue; 

Till my friends have said 

They would fain see, too, 

My star that dartles the red and the blue! 

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: 
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it, 
What matter to me if their star is a world? 

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it. 


“The Ring and the Book,” published in 1868, may be 
called the turning-point in the poet’s career. It is the 
longest and greatest of his creative works (some do not 
hesitate to say the greatest creative work since Shak- 
spere) ; it is the culmination of his earlier and better 
tendencies and also contains indications of a change 
that made his remaining work more metaphysical and 
obscure, more diffuse and inartistic. 

The volume of Mr. Browning’s work since 1870 is 
greater than that of his literary activity for the thirty- 
five preceding years, but there is a distinct loss in poetic 
qualities. He has always appealed to intellect rather 
than feeling, but as the years went on the poet was less, 
the thinker was more. He had the same intellectual 
keenness, the wisdom of a lengthening experience, but 
the creative imagination, the power to give life and 
beauty to his thought slowly passed away, or at least 
was not used. 

It has been said that Browning was long in coming 
to his kingdom, and we are not so sure as to what his 
kingdom is. He began his career with Tennyson and 
they passed close together into the realms of light. 
Browning has left a greater body of work than Tenny- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 121 


son, but how much will escape the tooth of time; who 
can tell. When Tennyson was made Laureate, Brown- 
ing was hardly known beyond the circle of a few 
friends. On the first publication of “Pauline” not a 
single copy was ever sold. A few years ago the Boston 
Browning Society sent an order to London to bid four 
hundred dollars for a copy to be sold at auction, and 
tailed to get it because the book brought twice that sum. 

Men differ still very widely about Browning. Some 
are offended by his originality and declare it careless- 
ness or eccentricity, an offense to clear thought and 
poetic taste. Others are stimulated to closer thought 
by the very difficulties he presents. The two attitudes 
are expressed by the two brothers Frederick and Alfred 
Tennyson, both poets and both intimate friends of 
Browning. The former said: “Though I have the 
highest esteem for Browning, and believe him to be a 
man of infinite learning, jest and bonhomie, and 
moreover a sterling heart that reverbs no hollowness, 
I verily believe his school of poetry to be the most 
grotesque conceivable. With the exception of the ‘Blot 
on the ’Scutcheon,’ through which you may possibly 
grope your way without the aid of an Ariadne, the rest 
appear to me to be Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, 
unapproachable nebulosities.” While Alfred Tennyson 
voices the mind of poets certainly when he says, 
“Browning never greatly cares about the glory of words 
or beauty of form. As for his obscurity in his great 
imaginative analyses, I believe it is a mistake to explain 
poetry too much; people have really a pleasure in dis- 
covering their own interpretations. He has a mighty 
intellect, but sometimes I can not read him. He seldom 
attempts the marriage of sense with sound, although he 
shows a spontaneous felicity in the adaptation of words 


122 TH SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


to ideas and feelings. I wish I had written his two 
lines: 


“The little more and how much it is, 
The little less and what worlds away” ; 


and again he speaks of him as the “greatest brained poet 
in England.” 

Mr. Browning was a most genial and attractive per- 
sonality. In youth he looked like a poet,—you have 
seen engravings after the painting by Watts,—but in 
the fulness of age more like a wise practical man of 
affairs. It may be that he has drawn a portrait of 
himself in “How It Strikes a Contemporary” in the 
poet who has no airs, no picturesque costume, nothing 
of the melodramatic, but who notes everything about 
him, remembers everything, and can, if needed, tell 
the tale, a Chaucer brought into the subtle and complex 
life of modern civilization. 

“It cannot have escaped the notice of anyone who 
knew Robert Browning well, and who compares him 
in thought with other men of genius whom he may have 
known, that it was not his strength only, his vehement 
and ever-eruptive force that distinguished him, but to 
an almost equal extent his humanity. Of all great poets 
he was the most accessible. To him the whole world 
was full of vague possibilities of friendship. . . . And, 
to those who shared a nearer intimacy than genial 
acquaintanceship could offer, is there one left to-day 
who was disappointed in his Browning or had any deep 
fault to find with him as a friend? Surely, no! He 
was human to the core, red with the warm blood to 
the center of his being.” 

And this is the first thing you feel in reading his 
poetry. And this is the truth he is always writing about, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 123 


the heart. There isn’t a line that is mawkish and senti- 
mental. He has a robust, masculine intellect and he 
compels you to think before you have a right to feel. 
He analyzes and dissects and follows coolly and crit- 
ically the ways of the soul, but it is the way of feeling, 
for that’s the way with the soul. He anticipates much 
that the psychologists have to tell us as to how our soul 
proceeds. He largely deals with the tragic elements of 
life. The peculiar, crucial tests of life, the situations 
that unconsciously reveal the inmost action, the morbid 
states, the individual developments all have a fascina- 
tion for his intellect, and each is given with its own 
color and form. There is only here and there a bit 
that in a strict sense can be called personal to himself, 
and yet you feel the broad, comprehensive, genial hu- 
manity of Browning, his great heart feeling with men 
in the strange and fateful vicissitudes of their lives. 
“Tt must be ten years ago, but the impression of the 
incident is as fresh upon me as though it happened 
yesterday,” says Mr. Gosse, “that Mr. Browning passed 
from languid and rather ineffectual discussion of some 
persons well known to us both into vivid and passionate 
apology for an act of his own Colombe.” 

Browning is like a great deep. It is easy to get 
beyond one’s depth or be blown out of sight of familiar 
landmarks. But one thing even a slight student of 
Browning must know, that the poet treats of the primal 
passion of the heart. He is the poet of'the soul and the 
first thing he interprets is Jove. He couldn’t be the in- 
terpreter of man and fail to do this; for love is the 
elemental and universal passion. In the ‘“Potter’s 
Wheel,” Ian Maclaren has this fine interpretation: “It 
has been said that each one of us could write one 
romance out of his own experiences, and if that be true, 


124 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


the subject would be love. Concerning this passion no 
self-respecting person will say much, and he that has 
felt its tides at their fullest will say least; but beyond 
question it remains the most irresistible and effectual in 
human experiences. In the second part of the Holy 
Scripture it is hardly touched upon, because the New 
Testament is the history of a cause; in the former part 
it meets us everywhere, from the idyll of Jacob and 
Rachel to the lamentable tragedy of Hosea, because 
the Old Testament is the story of human lives. The 
glory of pure love is sung in the Canticles ; the pollution 
of unchaste love is declared in Proverbs. The romance 
of Isaac meeting Rebecca in the eventide, and being her 
true husband till death, is an eternal contrast to David’s 
wandering passions and loathly degradation. Outside 
the Bible creative literature dealing with many motives 
has ever returned to love, and lavished its art on the 
analysis of this supreme passion, which, if bound with 
many cords, will yet tear itself free, and being outraged, 
will in the end pull down the very pillars of a human 
life. It may not be possible so to appraise the gains of 
life as to array them on a scale from highest to lowest, 
giving to culture, happiness, wealth, power, honor, each 
its own fixed place, since what is fascinating to one 
man is indifferent to his neighbor. No one in his senses 
can doubt, however, that love is the chief possession 
within our imagination, and that its power has not 
failed. For its sake a man has agonized and striven 
with the world and his soul; for its sake a woman has 
welcomed hardship and isolation, and both were right. 
Browning never struck a deeper and truer note than the 
divinity and sovereignty of love.” 

What does Browning mean by love? His love must 
never be confounded with lust, “‘hell’s own blue tint.” 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 125 


It touches the physical life and in its roots no doubt 
reaches down to the animal world below us. But it is 
infinitely more than natural, always mixed with the 
spirit. A man must love or lust and here is the possible 
height or depth of the human soul. 

Love in Browning is the “consecration of the undi- 
vided self.” It is infinite giving, holding nothing back. 
“A Woman’s Last Word” gives the conception : 


Be a god and hold me 
With a charm! 

Be a man and fold me 
With thine arm! 


Teach me, only teach, Love! 
As I ought 

I will speak thy speech, Love, 
Think thy thought— 


Meet, if thou require it, 
Both demands, 

Laying flesh and spirit 
In thy hands. 


Love joins life to life: they become under the unifying 
power of love like one soul. They are joined together 
as Tennyson says, “like perfect music unto perfect 
words.” Tennyson always thinks of love as obedient 
to law, as a question of social order; but Browning’s 
follows the high prompts of inner impulses. The one 
thinks of the sacredness of the social bond: the other 
thinks of the divine power that works in human hearts 
bringing them into vital union with others for the per- 
fecting of life. So to Tennyson, going aside from well- 
marked lines is the sin of love,—transgression ;—but to 
Browning it is omission: 


126 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin; 
Tho’ the end in sight was a vice, I say. 


The true union of heart and mind is the joy and good 
of this earthly life: their alienation and separation make 
the most pitiful chapter of human experience. It is 
the pathos of “James Lee’s Wife.” We see the prize 
of love as it slips despairingly out of reach. 


I 


Is all our fire of shipwreck wood, 
Oak and pine? 
Oh, for the ills half-understood, 
The dim dead woe 
Long ago 
Befallen this bitter coast of France! 
Well, poor sailors took their chance; 
I take mine. 


II 


A ruddy shaft our fire must shoot 
O’er the sea: 

Do sailors eye the casement—mute 
Drenched and stark, 
From their bark— 

And envy, gnash their teeth for hate 

O’ the warm safe house and happy freight 
—Thee and me? 


III 


God help you, sailors, at your need! 
Spare the curse! 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 127 


For some ships, safe in port indeed, 
Rot and rust, 
Run to dust, 
All through worms i’ the wood, which crept, 
Gnawed our hearts out while we slept: 
That is worse. 


IV 


Who lived here before us two? 
Old-world pairs. 
Did a woman ever—would I knew !— 
Watch the man 
With whom began 
Love’s voyage full-sail,—(now, gnash your 
teeth !) 
When planks start, open hell beneath 
Unawares? 
(“By the Fireside’) 


Love is the power of new life: it speaks to latent 
powers and calls them forth: it is the motive for high 
endeavor, the source of heroism and goodness. The 
main question is, Has a life learned to love another? 
it is the beginning of a higher life. 


One made to love you, let the world take note! 
Have I done worthy work? be love’s the praise, 
Tho’ hampered by restrictions, barred against 
By set forms, blinded by forced secrecies! 
Set free my love, and see what love can do 
Shown in my life—what work will spring from that! 
The world is used to have its business done 
On other grounds, find great effects produced 
For power’s sake, fame’s sake, motives in men’s mouth! 
So, good: but let my low ground shame their high! 
Truth is the strong thing. Let man’s life be true! 
And love’s the truth of mine. 

(“In a Balcony”) 


128 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


True lave always strives to purify and enrich. Love 
is of God and the very act has in it that which impels 
the soul homeward. 


Let her but love you, 
All else you disregard! What else can be? 
You know how love is incompatible 
With falsehood—purifies, assimilates 
All other passions to itself. 
(“Colombe’s Birthday”) 


Ne’er wrong yourself so far as quote the world 
And say, love can go unrequited here! 

You will have blessed him to his whole life’s end— 
Low passions hindered, baser cares kept back, 

All goodness cherished where you dwelt,—and dwell. 


Browning holds that love has in itself this purifying 
and ennobling power, however evil it be circumstanced, 
and however evil be its beginning. However we must 
remember that it must be love, some soul mixed with 
it, and not mere fleshly passion. Ifa spark of genuine 
love kindle in the heart of an impure life, it will tend, 
just so far as it is suffered to work, to cleanse the old 
baseness. 


What is wanting to success, 
If somehow every face, no matter how deform, 
Evidence, to some one of hearts on earth, that, warm 
Beneath the veriest ash, there hides a spark of soul 
Which, quickened by love’s breath, may yet pervade 
the whole 
OQ’ the gray, and, free again, be fire?—of worth the 
same, 
Howe’er produced, for, great or little, flame is flame. 
(“Fifine,” xliii) 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 129 


Though there is this element of divineness in true 
love, that tends to lift life to better things, its power is 
best seen in a pure life, in a Pamphilia or a Caponsacchi, 
it then shows likest God, for then only it has freedom 
to work. Like mercy or any other noble grace, it is 
mightiest in the mighty. In such lives it is felt to be an 
incoming of the heavenly life. 


God never is dishonored in the spark 

He gave us from his fire of fires, and bade 

Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid 

While that burns on, tho’ all the rest grow dim. 
(“Any Wife to Any Husband”) 


While love is the supreme object of man (no man is 
wholly without it, Nature herself has hints and fore- 
gleams of it, the roots of love and sacrifice reach down 
to the lowest nook and cranny of the world), the failure 
to realize the union of life with life, of soul with soul, 
what Plato called “the perfect whole,” makes the real 
suffering and pathos and tragedy of life. 

Even the base Ottima in “Pippa Passes” feels the 
beginning of terrible desolation as the gross love of 
herself and Sebald are flashed upon their souls in the 
song of the pure Pippa, and in the guilty man lust is 
turned to hate. 


That little peasant’s voice 
Has righted all again. Though I be lost, 
I know which is the better, never fear, 
Of vice or virtue, purity or lust, 
Nature or trick! I see what I have done, 
Entirely now! Oh I am proud to feel 
Such torments—let the world take credit thence— 
I, having done my deed, pay too its price! 
I hate, hate—curse you! God’s in his heaven! 


130 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


“Two in the Campagna” traces the infinite passion 
and the pain of finite hearts that yearn, and yet one 
refuses to learn the lesson of nature. 


I would that you were all to me, 

You that are just so much, no more. 

Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free! 
Where does the fault lie? What the core 
©’ the wound, since wound must be? 


In “The Worst of It,’ the wronged one cannot forget 
love and so the soul is purified: 


Well, it is lost now; well, you must bear, 

Abide and grow fit for a better day: 

You should hardly grudge, could I be your judge! 
But trust! For you, can be no despair: 

There’s amends: ’tis a secret: hope and pray! 


Enough has been said to show the lofty spiritual 
conception of Browning’s idea of love. One must keep 
this in mind to be saved from the sensual interpreta- 
tion of some of his poems. The expression of this love 
is oftentimes irregular, contrary to the seeming laws 
of society and God, a mere unguided impulse fed from 
below rather than above, but Browning does not mean 
it so, and if it have that impression on us it is because 
we carry into it our own evil desires. Here surely it is 
true that to the pure all things are pure. Sir Henry 
Jones in interpreting this truth of Browning declares, 
“Love is no accident in man’s history nor a passing emo- 
tion. It is rather a constitutive element of man’s nature, 
fundamental and necessary as his intelligence. It is 
the constructive power that has built the world of 
morality, binding man to man and age to age.” It may 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 131 


be a long way from mere sex-passion, seen in the ani- 
mals, to religious aspiration and self-surrender to God, 
but love is in all the moral and spiritual growth of men. 
It is not simply passion nor affection: it is intuition 
and ecstasy, and spiritual vision and eternal ideals. 
Love is man’s moral ideal and therefore is the very 
gift of God. So it is the key to the enigmas of life, 
the supreme moral motive, the veritable nature of both 
God and man. Love is of God, and he that loveth 
knoweth God. “It is the revelation of the Infinite Love 
to our souls which makes any worthy love of woman for 
man, or man for woman.” 

So love is the supreme motive of Browning’s art; 
he is always strong when dealing with it, and tries to 
reduce all phenomena of human experience to this single 
principle. Others have given love more tenderness 
and grace; none have given it such sweep and develop- 
ment. He has given to love its moral significance be- 
cause the soul is to Browning the supreme thing and he 
always treats its love with spiritual earnestness. 

From Browning’s doctrine of love comes his opti- 
mism, and he is the great optimist among poets. He 
wouldn’t be Browning without it. 

No doubt Browning was an optimist by temperament. 
From his early years, we know that he had discipline 
and many things to wound a sensitive spirit. But he 
did not dwell in the shadows. He walked in the sun. 
He kept a child’s delight in all simple pleasures, while 
his nature was responsive to all the good gifts of life. 
He had exuberant health and a buoyant nature and 
unfeigned humanity. The world seemed very good to 
him. The earth was a fit home for man. 

Earth’s changes, losses, struggles, did not change his 
temper. He had the habit of looking on the bright 


132 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


side. ‘At the ‘Mermaid’” gives the hopeful spirit of 
Mr. Browning’s disposition: 


Have you found your life distasteful? 
My life did and does smack sweet. 
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? 
Mine I saved and hold complete. 

Do your joys with age diminish? 
When mine fail me, Ill complain. 

Must in death your daylight finish? 
My sun sets to rise again. 


But Mr. Browning’s optimism was more than a mat- 
ter of health and sentiment. It was a profound con- 
viction. Life was organic; man belonged to a moral 
order, and that meant a harmonious world. It was not 
so now. The moral world was in a process of building. 
Human life was slowly and painfully realizing its ideal. 
But the warring elements were a prophecy of the world 
to be. The conviction of this purpose and process, of 
this final harmony of self and the world and God came 
from his doctrine of love. 

It was not an easy faith. He had to fight his way 
to it, even as Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. 
He would not make his judgment blind. He would face 
all the facts of life. He has as religious a purpose as 
Milton in “Paradise Lost.” He would justify the ways 
of God to man. Browning tries to give a philosophy 
of life. If love rules, it must issue in complete moral 
order. 


So, gazing up, in my youth, at love 
As seen thro’ powers, ever above 
All modes which make it manifest, 
My soul brought all to a single test— 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 133 


That He, the eternal first and last, 
Who in his power had so surpassed 
All man conceives of what is might,— 
Whose wisdom, too, showed infinite, 
Would prove us infinitely good: 
Would never (my soul understood) 
With power to work all love desires, 
Bestow e’en less than man requires. 
(“Christmas Eve”) 


Browning thinks of God as immanent, man’s love as 
the expression of the Divine love. 


Love which, on earth, amid all the shows of it, 
Has ever been seen the sole good of life in it, 
The love, ever growing there, spite of the strife in it, 
Shall arise, made perfect, from Death’s repose of it; 
And I shall behold Thee, face to face, 
O God, and in Thy light retrace 
How in all I loved here, still was’t Thou. 
(“Christmas Eve’) 


But Browning is not satisfied to admit, to feel the 
power of love. He would make all things plain. The 
poet turns philosopher. 

Remember, he holds to a moral order, that love is 
the law of the moral order, that love in man is the 
spark of God, that God is working through love for the 
redemption of the world. 

Now the poet faces a prudential difficulty. The 
doctrine of love is bruised against the hard facts of 
life, its sins and miseries and failures. Love itself 
seems prostituted. The divine fire is gone: nothing 
left but cold gray ashes. How can you say that “‘all’s 
love, yet all’s law,” when you see evil? Browning an- 
swers, How do you know that it is absolute evil? It 


134 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


may be only a foil to the good, only a means by which 
the soul is developed. 


As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good 
Needs evil: how were pity understood 
Unless by pain. 


Here comes the doctrine of the relativity of knowl- 
edge, and he pushes it so far that a less robust faith 
might easily fall into agnosticism. He draws the same 
antithesis between knowledge and love that Tennyson 
does between knowledge and faith. 

But reason will say to this philosophy of doubt, If 
you mistrust the conclusions of knowledge, how do you 
know that love itself is of God and to be trusted? And 
here Browning appeals from reason to conscience. 
What does the heart, the moral consciousness, say? 
Whatever the uses of evil, we know the fact of evil. 
We know it as evil: we have tasted its bitter fruit. The 
very evil in our hearts begets divine discontent and the 
undying hope of something better: 


Then life is—to wake not sleep, 

Rise and not rest, but press 

From earth’s level, where blindly creep . 
Things perfected, more or less, 

To the heaven’s bright, far steep, 

Where, amid what strifes and storms 

May wait the adventurous quest, 

Power is love—transports, transforms. 
Who aspired from worst to best, 

Sought the soul’s world, spurned the worms. 


Browning tries to harmonize all facts with his 
philosophy of love. As life is a growth, it is not possible 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 135 


at any time to pass fixed judgments upon man’s action. 
We grow by contest. To have contest we must recog- 
nize evil as evil, and as such hate and fight it. It may 
be only imperfect good. It is love’s way of progress. 
You see the poet assumes or denies the possibility of 
knowledge as it suits his philosophy. We may deny 
our knowledge of evil: we build on our knowledge 
of love. 

Life is not so simple as that. We would better stand 
with uncovered heads in the presence of God, and the 
mystery of evil. The first fallacy is the denial that God 
works through intelligence, but does work through love; 
and the second that our knowledge of sin is an illusion. 

We turn from Browning the philosopher to Browning 
the poet. Whatever the mazes of his philosophy, his 
spiritual instincts and visions never grow old. “Long 
as he lived, he did not live long enough for one of his 
ideals to vanish, for one of his enthusiasms to lose its 
heat.” 


There shall never be one lost good! ... 
All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall 


exist ; 

Not its semblance, but itself: no beauty, nor good, nor 
power 

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the 
melodist, 


When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
(“Abt Vogler’) 


There is no better tonic for anemic Christianity than 
the poetry of Browning. It is God’s message to an age 
whose intellectual life is often marked by a cynical 
pessimism. It is the noblest food of the soul for young 


136 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


men who aspire to be spiritual leaders, who need vision 
and faith and courage. He was 


One who never turned his back, but marched breast 
forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 
triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 
(‘‘Asolando” ) 


CiATAT DR Ty 


Browning's Interpretation of the Incarnation 





CHAPTER VII 
BROWNING’S INTERPRETATION OF THE INCARNATION 


Mr. Browning was a thoroughgoing idealist. On the 
solid English earth, his mind was above the mists and 
the malaria of a too practical earthly life. His shrewd, 
kindly, human eyes saw the passing show of life, noted 
every transient form and grace; but ever tried to pene- 
trate to their deeper meaning. He was a humanist, 
friendly to all humankind, but the ladder of life did 
not lie flat along the earth, but rose to the heavens. 
He tried to measure the movement of mankind, to 
understand the purpose and the goal of human life. 


Like a poet hidden 

In the light of thought, 

Singing hymns unbidden, 

Till the world is wrought 

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. 


In four ways Mr. Browning is ever showing his ideal- 
ism. (1) The importance of the inner and spiritual life 
over the outer and material. (2) The sense of a per- 
sonal God in all the life of the world, not to be demon- 
strated but accepted as one’s own life, without whom 
life is unaccountable and the world a ship of fools. 
(3) This world the vestibule of the eternal, immortality 
an inevitable inference from the fact of God and man’s 
relation to God. 


139 


140 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


All that is, at all, 
Lasts ever, past recall; 
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 
What entered into thee, 
That was, is, and shall be: 
Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay 
endure. 


(4) And therefore the significance of life is in its 
growth. Whatever checks, dwarfs the life is evil; 
whatever contributes to the freedom, fulness, growth 
of life is good, is God’s way of training a soul. And 
so to Browning, life is tested by its desire and struggle. 


Ah! but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, 
Or what’s a heaven for? 


Real life is positive, not negative, a passion for the 
higher. It is violence that taketh the kingdom of 
heaven. The sin of life is inaction and low content, 
“the unlit lamp, and the ungirt loin.” 

And here we have the key to Browning’s interpreta- 
tion of the Incarnation. God reveals Himself in Christ 
not simply to overcome evil, to forgive a inan’s sin 
and purge it away, so that life shall be free from defect. 
Sin is not the great fact. It is an obstacle, an incident, 
“a silence signifying sound,” a thing to be resisted that 
strength may be gained, to be fought that the warrior 
may be crowned. The center of all is man’s life, and 
that means man’s growth. And the Incarnation is 
needed for the revelation, and freedom and joy and 
growth of a man’s life. The Incarnation, to Browning, 
is God’s way of making a man. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 141 


I 


Take first, the Demand for the Incarnation. (A) The 
growth of life, the progress of man, demands the revela- 
tion of God to show the meaning of each life and the 
goal of growth. As man is a living soul, a self-direct- 
ing, responsible life, the ideal of this life must be ever 
before him if a true growth is to be attained, to make 
the way plain. “Cleon” is the cry of the human heart 
for a manifest God. There must be some purpose in 
all the work of life beyond the work itself. Cleon, the 
Greek poet from whom Paul quotes in his speech on 
Mars Hill, draws this lesson from the work of the king 
to whom he writes: 


Thou, in the daily building of thy tower, 
Whether in fierce and sudden spasms of toil, 

Or thro’ dim lulls of unapparent growth, 

Or when the general work ’mid good acclaim 
Climbed with the eye to cheer the architect, 
Did’st ne’er engage in work for mere work’s sake— 
Had’st ever in thy heart the luring hope 

Of some eventual rest a-top of it, 

Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, 
Thou first of men might’st look out to the East: 
The vulgar saw thy tower; thou sawest the sun. 


And so of his own work, Cleon says. He had been a 
great artist and wrought well. 


All arts are mine; 
Thus much the people know and recognize, 
Throughout our seventeen isles. 


142 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


And he is only one of a long line of workers. He tries 
to compare his work with that of his forerunners. 
With greater mind, he still looks not so great beside 
their simple way. But how can one judge a certain part 
when each part has reference to all? How can we 
know this sequence of the soul’s achievement here? 


Mankind, made up of all the single men,— 
In such a synthesis the labor ends. 


Is there true growth? Is there some ideal towards 
which the whole building is rising? How can we know 
its meaning ? 


And thus our soul, misknown, cries out to Zeus 
To vindicate his purpose in our life: 

Why stay we on the earth unless to grow? 
Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out, 
That he or other god descended here 

And, once for all, showed simultaneously 
What, in its nature, never can be shown 
Piecemeal or in successton;—showed, I say, 
The worth both absolute and relative 

Of all his children from the birth of time, 

His instruments for all appointed work. 


Is this vision of God coming into human life to show 
its meaning, to point out its goal, only the dream of a 
poet? It is no dream, 


That years and days, the summers and the springs, 
Follow each other with unwaning powers. 

The grapes which dye thy wine are richer far 
Through culture than the wild wealth of the rock; 
The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet; 

The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 143 


This is no dream. This is a matter of experience. We 
can see the growth of nature. We can trace the devel- 
opment through her various forms of life. This is a 
presumptive argument for the growth and fuller devel- 
opment of human life. What we see must be the be- 
ginning of an infinite growth. All lower life develops 
and—man ! 


What! and the soul alone deteriorates ? 


This is the argument of hope, but the heart cries out 
then as ever, “Show us the Father and it sufficeth us.” 
We long to have God descend to show the worth of all 
his children. So the experience of man demands a 
fuller revelation to tell us the meaning and issue of 
life. This is the demand for the Incarnation. 

(B) But we see the progress of life here. Man 
leaves the low levels of the natural life, the brute life, 
and gains the higher levels of the mind, the noble 
achievements of the civilized life. Why is not this 
enough, what we can see and gain here? Why not 
be content with our limits? The answer of Cleon is 
that the progress and achievement of man is a mockery 
without the life beyond. Is there a future life? No 
man from reason can surely say. 


It needs a spirit glance in realms beyond the sun. 


This is the demand for the Incarnation, a life that 
manifests and proves a higher realm than man of him- 
self can know. 

(1) Unless we have the future life, progress itself 
will be in vain. Shall we suffer and struggle and 
achieve, “gain ground upon the whole,” have the vision 


144 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


and hope of something better,—only to be snuffed out 
as a candle, to die like the brute? Better the content- 
ment of the beast than to have attained so much and 
hoped for so much, and then the end! 


Let progress end at once,—man make no step 
Beyond the natural man, the better beast, 
Using his senses, not the sense of sense. 

In man there’s failure, only since he left 

The lower and inconscious forms of life. 

We called it an advance, the rendering plain 
Man’s spirit might grow conscious of man’s life, 
And, by new love so added to the old, 

Take each step higher over the brute’s head. 
This grew the only life, the pleasure-house, 
Watch tower and treasure-fortress of the soul, 
Which whole surrounding flats of natural life 
Seemed only fit to yield subsistence to; 

A tower that crowns a country,—But alas, 

The soul now climbs it just to perish there! 


The poet asks the reason for all this seeming defeat of 
man. 


A man can use but a man’s joy 
While he sees God’s. 


It cannot be the malice of God. He will not suffer 
himself to think that. 


Is it carelessness? 
Still, no. If care—where is the sign, I ask, 
And yet no answer, and agree in sum, 
O King, with thy profound discouragement, 
Who seest the wider, but to sigh the more, 
Most progress is most failure; thou sayest well. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 145 


That’s what Paul said; “If in this life only we have 
hoped, we are of all men most pitiable.’ The great 
motives and forces of human progress would be weak- 
ened without the hope of the future. 

(2) But to return to Cleon’s argument. If the per- 
sonal life of man beyond these earthly limits is uncer- 
tain, not so his work and influence. That shall live on 
in the race: that is our contribution to the development 
of mankind. ‘Why should we have two immortalities,” 
said the old skeptics,—as the new ones also say. Is 
not this craving for the continuance of the personal 
life a kind of selfishness? We can all join George 
Eliot’s “Choir Invisible.” 


May I reach 
That purest heaven, be to other souls 
The cup of strength in some great agony, 
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, 
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty— 
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, 
And in diffusion ever more intense. 
So shall I join the choir invisible 
Whose music is the gladness of the world. 


But unconscious immortality will never satisfy a man. 
If this life is all, the practical conclusion will be that 
the sensualist or the pessimist has the best of it. It is 
a question whether all this struggle and sorrow is worth 
the candle. Joy demands a larger, freer air in which 
to live and breathe. Man’s growth must be something 
more than a tower rising from the earth. He must do 
more than build his sepulchre. Not only the meaning 
and growth of life demand the revelation of a future 
world, but the very satisfaction of man, the sense of 
joy for which he was made, cannot be met without it. 


146 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Cleon is not comforted because the king speaks of the 
immortality of the poet’s work. 


What 
Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: 
Sappho survives, because we sing her songs, 
And Aéschylus, because we read his plays! 


* * * * * 


Thou diest while I survive? 
Say rather that my fate is deadlier still, 
In this, that every day my sense of joy 
Grows more acute, my soul (intensified 
By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; 
While every day my hairs fall more and more, 
My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase,— 
My horror quickening still from year to year, 
The consummation coming past escape, 
When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy,— 
When all my works wherein I prove my worth, 
Being present still to mock me in men’s mouths, 
Alive still, in the phrase of such as thou, 
I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, 
The man who loved his life so overmuch, 
Shall sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, 
I dare at times imagine to my need 
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
Unlimited in capability 
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,— 
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us: 
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait 
On purpose to make prized the life at large— 
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, 
We burst there as the worm into the fly, 
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings,—But no! 
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, 
He must have done so, were it possible. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 147 


Thus Mr. Browning puts into the speech of Cleon 
that infinite pathos of the Old World shut up to the limit 
of this life; and as seen in more than one of the great 
thinkers and poets, a longing for fuller light. And at 
the same time, he makes him express the scorn which 
the cultivated Greek world would feel at being taught 
by a Jewish peasant. 


Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, 
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised, 
Hath access to a secret shut from us? 


Christ was to the Greeks foolishness. 

“Cleon” is the voice of reason, demanding the Incar- 
nation to make life intelligible; “Karshish” is the in- 
stinctive cry of the heart to make life moral and 
beneficent. Karshish, an Arab physician, traveling in 
Palestine to gain knowledge for his work, chances to 
meet with Lazarus, and tells his strange story in a letter 
to Abib his master. It is one of the most characteristic 
and significant of Browning’s dramatic monologues. 
Through all the calculated thought and plan of Karshish 
is revealed the deep impression made upon him by the 
man and his story. His very heart is laid bare as the 
impress of the early seas in the geologic strata. He 
tells the singular way in which he met the man, He 
recounts the story of his restoration from the grave. 


The man’s own firm conviction rests 
That he was dead (in fact they buried him) 
—That he was dead and then restored to life 
By a Nazarene physician of his tribe. 


The Arab calls it only a case of mania, superinduced by 
epilepsy. But in spite of this easy judgment, he admits 


148 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


that the case has struck him far more than ’tis worth. 
He admits that this man has a different attitude towards 
life. 


Whence has the man the balm that brightens all? 
So here—we call the treasure knowledge, say, 
Increased beyond the fleshly faculty— 

Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, 
Earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven. 


He wonders that men do not see with his opened eyes. 


Indeed, the special marking of the man 
Is pious submission to the heavenly will— 
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is. 


Karshish admits this life so different from every other, 
but of course a learned doctor must write, 


And, after all, our patient Lazarus 

Is stark mad. 

This man so cured regards the curer, then, 

As,—God forgive me! who but God himself, 

Creator and Sustainer of the world, 

That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile! 
* * s * x 

Who saith—but why all this of what he saith? 

Why write of trivial matters, things of price 

Calling at every moment for remark? 

I noticed on the margin of a pool 

Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort, 

Aboundeth, very nitrous. 


Then the deep impression breaks through the careless 
manner, and he adds, “It is strange !’’ And with another 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 149 


brief reference to Lazarus, and then some more com- 
monplaces, the physician’s very heart, all the deep and 
even unconscious longings for that which he had never 
before been able to express, bursts forth in the post- 
script of the letter (among the noblest words of 
Browning). 


The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 

So, the All-great were the All-Loving too— 

So, through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, ‘O heart, I made, a heart beats here! 
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 

Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine, 
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 

And thou must love me who have died for thee!’ 
The madman saith He said so: it is strange. 


This is the heart-cry that so many men have uttered 
from the drama of Job, with its “God is not a man as 
Iam... Neither is there any daysman betwixt us 
to lay his hand upon us both’; to the words of 
Horace Bushness in our own day: ‘My heart cries 
out for God. I can shatter the doctrine of the 
Trinity with my reason, but my heart needs God 
the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy 
Spirit.” 

Men know the power of God, if they admit the fact 
of God at all. But they stumble at the love of God. 
How can the All-great be the All-loving in this world 
of pain and moral disorder! If man has a nature that 
allies him to God, the heart of the child that cannot be 
content without the revelation of the heart of the 
Father is the strongest demand for the Incarnation. 
And this is the striking witness of Karshish. 


150 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


II 


The demand for Revelation is answered in Christ. 
Christ as the divine complement to man’s need is taught 
by Browning especially in three poems: “The Ring and 
the Book,” “Christmas Eve,” and “Easter Day.” 

(A) “The Ring and the Book” is the longest and 
most difficult of the poems. Twelve books are written 
on a single tragic tale found in an old manuscript; the 
story as regarded by twelve different groups of people; 
their relation to it, their thoughts, their speech, their 
conduct, the very atmosphere of their lives, all reveal- 
ing character: enough material, as one critic truly says, 
to make the reputation of a score of poets. 

It is in “The Pope” that the reasonableness of the 
Incarnation is expressed. The doctrine meets the heart 
of man, but can it satisfy the reason? ‘To have the 
heart rise up and say with Tennyson “I have felt,” is 
not enough for the great conviction that shall control 
the race. Man is a unit and the intellect must give 
its assent to the promptings of the heart. The Incarna- 
tion is a question of the reason also: it must be met 
and answered there. Look at the Incarnation as the 
question of the mind. Man is the highest mind that 
we know here. But man fails of his own conceivable 
height, i.e., man’s mind cannot account for the world. 
We must go to God. A life greater than ourselves must 
account for man, for all the process that has resulted 
in the mind of man. 

We must judge God by his world. That’s the law 
of knowledge. Beyond this we cannot go. And what 
does the world say of God? What do the works of 
God reveal? In them, we find power enough. In them, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 151 


we find éntelligence ample. But goodness? Here the 
revelation of God fails. Nature often seems “red in 
tooth and claw with ravin.” Human life often seems 
a tangled skein. But the Incarnation throws light upon 
it all. The Easter morn sheds a new glory on the 
earth. Bethlehem and Calvary bring human life out of 
the shadow. Pain is not so dark, its burden is certainly 
lightened—when we know that God himself has entered 
into it, “bearing our sins and carrying our sorrows.” 
The Incarnation makes love unlimited and complete. 
Then reason is satisfied, there is perfection fit for God. 
But let Browning express the thought. The Pope says: 


There is, beside the works, a tale of Thee 

In the world’s mouth, which I find credible: 

I love it with my heart: unsatisfied, 

I try it with my reason, nor discept 

From any point I probe and pronounce sound. 
Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but 
Above,—leave matter, then, proceed with mind! 
Man’s be the mind recognized at the height,— 
Leave the inferior minds and look at man! 

Is he the strong, intelligent, and good 

Up to his own conceivable height? Nowise. 
Enough o’ the low,—soar the conceivable height, 
Find cause to match the effect in evidence, 

The work i’ the world, not man’s but God’s; leave man! 
Conjecture of the worker by the work: 

Is there strength there ?—enough: intelligence? 
Ample: but goodness in a like degree? 

Not to the human eye in the present state, 

An isosceles deficient in the base. 

What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God 

But just the instance which this tale supplies 
Of love without a limit? So is strength, 

So is intelligence; let love be so, 


152 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Unlimited in its self-sacrifice, 
Then is the tale true and God shows complete. 


Beyond this, Browning would say, 


I reach into the dark, 
Feel what I cannot see; and still faith stands. 


Whether sin and suffering are for moral training here, 
not absolute evil, this is all surmise. The Incarnation 
is revealed and it meets the demands of reason. 

(B) In “Christmas Eve,’ Browning impressively 
teaches that all who believe that God in Christ has 
given Himself in love to men, know God and have 
fellowship with Him. On Christmas Eve, the poet 
finds himself in a mean chapel in a mean neighborhood. 
No doubt it is a memory of his own youth in York St. 
chapel, South London, now the seat of the Browning 
Hall Settlement. The congregation seems repulsive to 
aman of taste and the preacher gives them the merest 
commonplaces of the Gospel. There was no suggestion 
to the poet of the deep things of God, and he goes out 
under the night sky where God seems nearer to him. 


In youth I looked to those very skies 

And, probing their immensities, 

I found God there, His visible Power; 

Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense 

Of the Power, an equal evidence 

That His Love, there too, was the nobler dower; 
For the loving worm within the clod 

Were diviner than a loveless God 

Amid His worlds, I well dare to say. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 153 


The poet has a wonderful vision of the sky and seems 
to feel that some one will come forth from the very 
place of God. Then a blinding storm sweeps away the 
vision, and when the sky has cleared, the figure of 
Christ appears before him. 


He was there, 
He himself with the human air 
On the rainbow pathway, just before. 


Christ’s back is turned towards him, and then the poet 
understands that he has been in the despised chapel, 
with its poor folk. And Christ is grieved at his own 
blindness and disdain. He pleads with Christ that he 
had left the chapel because they had such narrow, un- 
worthy ideas of Him, and had sought the open heaven 
that Christ in His real glory might appear. Then Christ 
turned his face upon him with such a glory that he could 
not bear it. 

Swept along by the hem of Christ’s robe, the poet 
suddenly finds himself at Rome, witnessing the splendid 
ceremonial of Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s. He is 
offended at the grotesqueness and vainglory of the 
worship, but he has learned the lesson of the chapel and 
the vision, and that the elaborate ceremonial is the im- 
perfect human way of trying to express the stupendous 
fact of the Incarnation. 

Once more the scene changes and the poet is in a 
lecture room at Gottingen, listening to a learned Pro- 
fessor explaining the myth of Christ. He explains 
away all the mysterious in the person of Christ, makes 
him simply a good man. And the Professor ends his 
lecture by urging his students to cherish the tender and 
pathetic story of Christ’s life and death, though they 


154 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


can no longer worship Him and place their hopes upon 
Him. The poet feels the chill of the critical class room, 
and knows that the learned Professor has not touched 
the hem of Christ’s garment. 

And here Browning shows his own deep faith in the 
Incarnation. In light, bantering satire——but the poet 
is never more earnest,—he shows what reverencing the 
myth amounts to. Christ no longer supports us, but 
we try to support the Christ, try to draw light and com- 
fort from the very creature which our own imagination 
has made. 


Deduce from this lecture all that eases you; 
Nay, call yourselves, if the calling pleases you, 
‘Christians’,—abhor the deist’s pravity— 

Go on, you shall no more move my gravity— 
Than, when I see boys ride a-cock horse 

I find it in my heart to embarrass them 

By hinting that their stick’s a mock horse 

And they really carry what they say carries them. 


Once more the poet is back at Zion chapel, where all 
the time he had been dreaming, and the poem closes 
with one of the noblest pleas of practical faith. Christ 
does meet the world’s need; and what moré can the 
mind of man ask! 


Is God mocked, as he asks? 
Shall I take on me to change His tasks, 
And dare, despatched to a river-head 
For a simple draught of the element, 
Neglect the thing for which he sent, 
And return with another thing instead? 
Saying, ‘Because the water found 
Welling up from underground, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 155 


Is mingled with the taints of earth, 

While thou, I know, dost laugh at dearth, 

And could’st, at wink or word, convulse 

The world with the leap of a river-pulse,— 

Therefore I turn from the oozings muddy, 

And bring thee a chalice I found instead: 

See the brave veins in the breccia ruddy! 

One would suppose, that the marble bled. 

What matters the water? I hope I have nursed: 
- The waterless cup will quench my thirst.’ 

—Better have knelt at the poorest stream 

That trickles in pain from the straitest rift! 

For the less or the more is all God’s gift, 

Who blocks up or breaks wide the granite-seam. 

And here, is there water or not to drink? 

I then, in ignorance and weakness, 

Taking God’s help, have attained to think 

My heart does best to receive in meekness 

That mode of Worship, as most to his mind, 

Where earthly aids being cast behind, 

His All in All appears serene 

With the thinnest human veil between, 

Setting the mystic lamps, the seven, 

The many motions of his Spirit, 

Pass, as they list, from earth to heaven. 

For the preacher’s merit or demerit, 

It were to be wished the flaws were fewer 

In the earthen vessel holding treasure, 

Which lies as safe as in a golden ewer; 

But the main thing is, does it hold good measure? 

Heaven soon sets right all other matter! 


(C) In “Easter Day,” Mr. Browning deals with the 
practical difficulties of faith in the Incarnation. There 
are speculative difficulties,—every honest thinker must 
admit them,—but the practical difficulties of life are 


156 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


what really stand in the way of faith. Itis hard to bea 
Christian, is the gist of the trouble. 

Belief stands first. A man must accept the fact of 
the Incarnation. It is not absolutely certain, says the 
critical mind. But some uncertainty is necessary to 
faith. It is so with our human affairs. About the 
matters that greatly concern us, we can never be abso- 
lutely certain, yet we are compelled to act, and it is the 
act of faith. But should it not be different with God 
in Christ? The fact is so stupendous and makes such 
radical demands upon us? Can’t we demonstrate God? 
Can’t we have exacter laws? No; the greatest truths 
never can be proved. A scientific faith is absurd. A 
man must act upon probability in all matters of moral 
conduct, and there is probability enough for the Christ. 
You'll find evidence, if you desire. There is historic 
fact and human need that interprets the fact. 

But belief in Christ makes such demand upon us. 
The Christ is not simply to give our joys zest, to adda 
certain spiritual culture to men: he demands the great 
renunciation. Take up the Cross, and follow me. What 
if we should renounce life for death only? We have 
hope and by this we must live. 

The real choice of life is presented through the vision 
of the Judgment and the figure of Christ. 

The soul says the earth is too close and good to give 
up. Then, Heaven is lost, is the answer. If we must 
give up the pleasant life of earth as the chief good, 
then, says man, we will choose mind and its works. 
Surely the intellectual life is the higher life. And the 
answer of the Judge is,—still it is the choice of earth. 
There is one good left, pleads the soul, and that is 
human love. Choose love, then, for there can be nothing 
better than love. Blind, blind, replies the Christ. The 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 157 


Divine Love is through earth, mind, love, to help men 
make the true use of all. Christ, the Divine Love in- 
carnate, must be seen and chosen, if the fair and noble 
things of earth are to project the soul on its lone way. 
And the words of Browning are the practical witness 
of every life that bows before the wonderful vision of 
the Christ. 


And I cowered deprecatingly— 

Thou Love of God! Or let me die, 
Or grant what shall seem heaven almost! 
Let me not know that all is lost, 
Though lost it be;—leave me not tied 
To this despair, this corpse-like bride! 
Let that old life seem mine—no more— 
With limitation as before, 

With darkness, hunger, toil, distress: 

Be all the earth a wilderness! 

Only let me go on, go on, 

Still hoping ever and anon 

To reach one eve the Better Land! 


III 


Thus far Browning’s belief in the Incarnation has 
been interpreted, his reasons for holding it, however 
mysterious, as the great fact of life. It remains to 
be seen how Browning realized the truth, so that it 
became more than an infinite fact to be accepted by the 
reason,—how it became the vital truth of his thought 
and life. The method by which the poet would make 
the Incarnation real to himself and to all men is seen in 
the poem “Saul.” It teaches that Love Incarnate is the 
only power to redeem man. 

The poem is based upon the sixteenth chapter of First 


158 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Samuel, King Saul afflicted by the evil spirit. He had 
made evil king; and now he was in the darkness of 
his tent, in the very midnight of the soul. Abner brings 
the young David, “with God’s dew on his gracious gold 
hair,’ the fresh lilies twined around his harp-strings, 
that his music might free the spirit of the king. David 
knelt and prayed and then entered the black tent. The 
great figure of the king stood motionless and gloomy 
in the center. 

David tuned his harp and played first the songs of 
nature; the tune that calls the sheep home, the music 
the quails follow. Then he played the songs of life, 
the song of the reapers, the funeral dirge for the dead, 
the marriage hymn, the battle-song, the chorus of the 
priests. As the music paused, Saul groaned and it 
seemed as though life were coming back to him. 

Then David bent over his harp again and sang. He 
sang of the beauty of God’s world and the joy of living. 
And finally he began to sing the story of Saul’s life, 
his beauty and strength and brave deeds, the glory of 
fame and power. And as he came to the end he sounded 
the name, “Saul,” as though it were the shout of a 
nation. And the blackness rolled away from Saul’s 
soul. Death was past, but life was not yet come. Thus 
with arms folded across his chest, the king stood. What 
could the minstrel sing more? How bring to the soul 
of the awakened king a new life? ’Twas God that 
gave him the song. He sang the hope of life, of tri- 
umph at last. He sang the blessed Gospel that by God’s 
mercy the past may be left forever. Let the old Saul 
be dead. “In the depth of the vale make his tomb.” 
Let a new Saul arise from the grave of the old. 

The young minstrel loves the king; what would he 
not do to fill this man’s life with love and power? And 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY _ 159 


now Browning himself speaks through the words of 
David, and from the very depths of his soul. Deeper 
or more sincere utterance never came from the lips of 
poet. The message is a simple one. Every one can 
feel its force. Every faculty which I have, God must 
have in an infinite degree. If I love this man, how 
God must love him! If I would sacrifice myself to save 
Saul from his bondage, will God do less? 


Would I suffer for him that I love? So would’st Thou, 
so wilt Thou! 

So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost 
crown— 

And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 

One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath, 

Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue 
with death! 

As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 

Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved! 

He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall 
stand the most weak. 

’*Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh 
that I seek 

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me 

Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand like 
this hand 

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! 

See the Christ stand! 






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CHAP Rey Lit 


Matthew Arnold, The Poet of the Questioning 
Spirit 





CHAPTER VIII 


MATTHEW ARNOLD, THE POET OF THE QUESTIONING 
SPIRIT 


Matthew Arnold’s closing words concerning Marcus 
Aurelius, in the volume “Essays in Criticism,” might 
be taken as a truthful characterization of the poet’s own 
life: “We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, 
thankful, blameless; yet, with all this, agitated, stretch- 
ing out his arms to something beyond,—tendentemque 
manus ripz ulterioris amore.” 

When Wordsworth died in 1850, Arnold was twenty- 
seven and already recognized as a critic. And what 
he first assayed to do became a lifelong habit. What- 
ever the form of literature, he was always a critic. 

As a poet, Wordsworth no doubt had the greatest 
influence over his life. Fox Howe, the country house 
of Thomas Arnold, is in the valley of the Rothay just 
below Rydal Mount, the last and long home of Words- 
worth, and the two families, near neighbors and of 
kindred tastes, became close frineds. Matthew Arnold 
from a lad was taught to reverence the poet and the 
scenes he loved were associated with the person and 
verse of Wordsworth. 

And in April, 1850, on the occasion of the Laureate’s 
death, Arnold wrote the memorial verses in which oc- 
curs the fine tribute to his master, and the expression 
of his critical and questioning melancholy which 
marked so much of his poetry. 

163 


164 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


He too upon a wintry clime 

Had fallen—on this iron time 

Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears, 
He found us when the age had bound 
Our souls in its benumbing round: 

He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears. 
He laid us as we lay at birth 

On the cool flowery lap of earth, 
Smiles broke from us and we had ease; 
The hills were round us, and the breeze 
Went o’er the sunlit fields again; 

Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
Our youth return’d; for there was shed 
On spirits that had long been dead, 
Spirits dried up and closely furl’d, 

The freshness of the early world. 


Arnold always regarded Wordsworth as his master, 
yet his reverence and love did not blur his critical vision 
or blunt the edge of his critical judgment. He was able 
to separate the gold from the dull ore, and in his selec- 
tions has given the best of Wordsworth, and in his 
Introduction a criticism unsurpassed in appreciation 
and discrimination. 

He loved the outdoor world quite as strongly as 
Wordsworth, but with a different temper. INot so much 
with the spirit of contemplation as that of pure joy, 
the sensations of pleasure at form and color. His in- 
terest was not so much in studying the impress on his 
own soul, as in the life itself of plant and animal. His 
letters are full of descriptions of plants, with their 
scientific terms, and the physical geography of a new 
country and its animal and vegetable life he examined 
with the same interest that he studied man. He loved 
the good brown earth and his veins tingled with all the 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 165 


life of the world. He had full red blood in his veins 
and he loved all manly exercises that called him out of 
doors. Such sports as skating, tennis and fly fishing 
he kept up with increasing zest to the very end of his 
life. 

But to understand the man, and especially his attitude 
towards the accepted forms of Christian truth, we must 
know that he was a critic. This temper of mind he 
carried into all his work. 

He was a critic in questions of society and govern- 
ment. In this respect he was in striking contrast to 
Wordsworth. As a young man, both were Republicans. 
Wordsworth was an ardent Republican; his soul was 
kindled with hope ; he threw himself with an enthusiastic 
devotion, with self-abandonment on the side of Repub- 
lican France. And though he later turned from politics 
to the meditative life of a poet, and was a very staid 
and conventional Tory, the fiery impulses of youth left 
with him an abiding interest and faith in the essential 
worth of every man. Arnold had the same faith, but 
never the same enthusiasm. His judgment taught him 
to read aright the movements of life and to hold to the 
rights of man as the true theory of society, but he saw 
the weaknesses and the long struggles, and so he was 
always more inclined to give advice than to lend a hand. 
This attitude is exactly expressed in a poem, “To a 
Republican Friend”: 


God knows it, Iam with you. If to prize 
Those virtues, prized and practised by too few, 
But prized, but loved, but eminent in you, 
Man’s fundamental life; if to despise 


The barren optimistic sophistries 
Of comfortable moles, whom what they do 


166 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Teaches the limit of the just and true 
(And for such doing they require not eyes) ; 


If sadness at the long heart-wasting show 
Wherein earth’s great ones are disquieted; 
If thoughts, not idle, while before me flow 


The armies of the homeless and unfed— 
If these are yours, if this is what you are, 
Then am I yours, and what you feel, I share. 


Yet, when I muse on what life is, I seem 

Rather to patience prompted, than that proud 

Prospect of hope which France proclaims so loud— 
* * x a * 

Nor will that day dawn at a human nod, 

When, bursting through the network superposed 

By selfish occupation—plot and plan, 


Lust, avarice, envy—liberated man, 
All difference with his fellow-mortal closed, 
Shall be left standing face to face with God. 


Theoretically he believed in the people and in the ex- 
tended sphere of the State, but practically he admired 
the Remnant. He was keen and suggestive in his criti- 
cism of national tendencies, but his tastes were with the 
people of leisure and position. And so he wavered 
between political principle and social taste, or rather 
between the two he always stood with a certain cool 
and self-controlled aloofness. He recognized the cruel 
wrongs of the Irish people; he pointed them out long 
before the politicians ; but when something practical was 
attempted, no man could be more critical of the Liberals 
and of Gladstone’s policy. In politics he was critical 
rather than constructive. He pitied the poor, but he 
pitied them from above. He was, to use the words of 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 167 


Goldwin Smith, “a gentleman of a jaunty air, and on 
good terms with the world,’ “a Hebrew prophet in 
white kid gloves.” 

No doubt Matthew Arnold’s best critical work is in 
literature. Here he is a recognized master. He escaped 
from provincial bounds more than most English writers. 
With the English sturdy love of substance and truth, 
_he combined the French love of form. He knew other 
languages and literatures than English, was as much 
at home in Homer and A¢schylus as Shakspere, in 
Goethe as Wordsworth. He was a disciple of Sainte- 
Beuve, the great French critic, and had much of the 
French temper of mind; over his English seriousness 
played the light of French grace and wit. He rev- 
erenced form with truth, and sometimes allowed his 
esthetic taste to be the chief test of worth. He aimed 
at simplicity but it was sometimes simplesse,—to use the 
French distinction of Mr. Russell his friend and biog- 
rapher,—the simulance of simplicity rather than sim- 
plicity itself. He had a true love for nature, the truth 
of the world and of man, but he had to see it through 
his own eyes and the vision could never be quite freed 
from the color of the spectacles. As when he calls 
General Grant a greater man than Abraham Lincoln, 
and when he speaks of Tennyson as lacking in intel- 
lectual qualities. It seemed as though he lacked appre- 
ciation for the men of his own age: in the attempt to 
quicken the English mind and create a pure taste for 
literature, he exaggerated the worth of foreign litera- 
tures, especially the French. Professor Saintsbury 
shows the error of the critical spirit in commenting on 
some of Arnold’s statements in his “Essays in Criti- 
cism”’: “Here is the astounding statement that ‘not 
very much of current English literature comes into 


168 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


this best that is known and thought in the world. Not 
very much I fear: certainly less than of the current 
literature of France and Germany.’ And this was 1865, 
when the Germans had had no great poet but Heine 
for a generation, nor any great poets but Goethe and 
Heine for five hundred years. It was 1865 when all 
the great French writers, themselves of but some thirty 
years’ standing, were dying off, not to be succeeded! 
Eighteen-sixty-five, when for seventy years England 
had not lacked, and for nearly thirty more was not to 
lack, poets and prose writers of the first order by the 
dozen and almost by the score.” 

Nevertheless Arnold was a keen and kind critic. He 
had a genuine appreciation of the great names of our 
language and he knew them. He had a horror of 
unreality. He impaled the “desperate endeavors to 
render a platitude endurable by making it pompous.” 
He held up a pure standard to a generation of writers. 
Better Introduction to literature cannot be found than 
such essays as those on Wordsworth and Milton. He 
is worthy of Mr. Russell’s estimate: “Whatever may 
be thought of the substance of his writings, it surely 
must be admitted that he was a great master of style. 
And his style was altogether his own. In the last year 
of his life, he said to the present writer, ‘People think 
I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have 
something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. 
That is the only secret of style.’ ” 

The critical temper which we have seen in politics 
and literature, Matthew Arnold brought into questions 
of religion. He took upon himself the serious task of 
being the mentor of his countrymen. And his criti- 
cisms of religion such as “Literature and Dogma” are 
probably his best known writings and have had the 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY _ 169 


greatest influence on our time. He certainly desired 
the truth in religion. But he looked at the Bible and 
the doctrines of Protestantism as a literary man and a 
critic; and he emphasized the human elements and the 
literary qualities and ignored or denied the supernat- 
ural; and his critical temper led him to accept the latest 
views of authorship and message without the sufficient 
knowledge to form a critical estimate. His admiration 
for foreign literatures put him easily under the influ- 
ence of Renan and Strauss. He was certainly influ- 
enced too much by the dilettante attitude of Renan. 
There is no keener criticism of Matthew Arnold’s 
position in religion than that by Mr. Carnegie Simpson 
in his “The Fact of Christ.” He speaks of the most 
serious and influential modern criticism of Christianity 
as professedly reconstructive. “It desires not the ruin 
of Christianity but its rescue. It would give us the 
true and simple and pure Christian religion in place 
of the beclouded and corrupt tradition of the centu- 
ries... . I hope it may be said without offense that 
to one with any grave historical sense there is some- 
thing about this that savors a little of what might be 
described as intellectual nouvelle richesse. To propose 
to take down the structure of a Christianity that has 
stood for centuries, and to rebuild it largely anew, to 
allege that the main idea of the thing has been radically 
misconstrued, and needs to be started afresh, to say 
that the lines laid down and followed by St. John and 
St. Paul, by Athanasius, Augustine, Luther, are largely 
misleading and a new direction at this hour of the day 
must be taken,—one cannot help feeling that all this, 
like the philosophy of the man who has struck oil, 
lacks historic background. Under what a melancholy 
mistake have these nineteen centuries been laboring! 


170 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


On what a false scent those apostles put us! what a 
pity that St. John, ‘who was so much more metaphysical 
than his Master,’ was ever allowed to write about Him, 
or that St. Paul, whom the older rationalism held to 
be the real creator of Christianity, appeared just at the 
critical, formative moment he did in Christian history! 
And how thankful we should be that now, at last, such 
a clever and still ingenuous man as the author of Lit- 
erature and Dogma has come to put us right.... 
These reconstructions have many aspects of value, for 
the Church is constantly in danger of being a slave to 
its past and of thinking that a quotation from a Father 
or a confession is the final word of truth. But it does 
not do to put a fool’s cap on the history of the Chris- 
tian religion.” 

Underneath the “easy, sinuous, unpolemical” style of 
the essays one can feel the high purpose of Mr. 
Arnold; and he has taught us to regard the Bible with 
more genuine human interest. “To understand that 
the language of the Bible is fluid, passing and literary, 
not rigid, fixed and scientific, is the first step towards 
the right understanding of the Bible. But to take this 
very step, some experience of how men have thought 
and expressed themselves, and some flexibility of spirit, 
are necessary; and this is culture.” He has put some 
of his criticism in unforgettable phrase: “When we 
are asked, What is the object of religion ?—let us reply, 
Conduct. And when we are asked further, What is 
conduct? — Let us answer, Three-fourths of life.” 
“The true meaning of religion is not simply morality, 
but morality touched by emotion.’ “They had dwelt 
upon the thought of conduct and right and wrong, till 
the not ourselves which is in us and all around us, be- 
came to them adorable eminently and altogether as a 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 171 


power which makes for righteousness, which makes for 
it unchangeably and eternally, and is therefore called 
the eternal.’ His affirmations were often strongly reli- 
gious, but his negations were often influenced by the 
distaste for the dogmatism and what he called the 
Philistinism of the Dissenters. He did not have Brown- 
ing’s faith to see the spiritual realities beneath creed 
and form and even ignorant enthusiasm. 


Better have knelt at the poorest stream 
That trickles in pain from the straitest rift! 
For the less or the more is all God’s gift. 


But despite his negative criticism and his unwillingness 
to attribute personality to God, Matthew Arnold was a 
good man, reverencing the character of Christ, trying 
to conform his life to his law. “His theology, once the 
subject of such animated criticism, seems now a mat- 
ter of little moment; for indeed his nature was essen- 
tially religious. He was loyal to truth as he knew it, 
loved the light and sought it earnestly, and by his daily 
and hourly practice gave sweet and winning illustra- 
tion of his own doctrine that conduct is three-fourths 
of human life.” (Russell, p. 264.) 

Matthew Arnold has never been a popular poet. He 
has been read by only a few, and even they differ as 
to his future. Within certain limits he was a true poet 
and he had a strong faith in the future of his poetry. 
He says in a letter to his mother in 1869: “My poems 
represent on the whole the main movement of mind 
of the last quarter of a century, and they will thus 
probably have their day as people become more con- 
scious to themselves of what that movement of mind 
is, and interested in the literary productions which re- 


172 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


flect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poet- 
ical sentiment than Tennyson and less intellectual vigor 
and abundance than Browning; yet because I have per- 
haps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, 
and have more regularly applied that fusion to the 
main line of modern development, I am likely enough 
to have my turn, as they have had theirs.” Such a 
letter as this, and his well-known definition of poetry 
as “a criticism of life,’ tell us why he did not write 
much poetry and why he did not speak to the heart 
of man. He was too much a critic to be a poet in an 
ample sense. He was never disturbed, never profoundly 
moved. He could never give himself unreservedly to 
any cause. He was not simple and sensuous and pas- 
sionate. But more than this he was not hopeful and 
joyful. He had a half melancholy contemplation of 
life. And poetry that is a message of life is born of 
a great hope and faith. 

His first book of poetry, 1849, when he was twenty- 
six, is a most remarkable first book. But he wrote lit- 
tle poetry and with much difficulty. Most of it was 
written before he was thirty-five. And though he re- 
peatedly vows to turn to what he always called his true 
vocation, he wrote almost nothing of value the last 
thirty years of his life. His laborious duties of school 
inspector no doubt in part account for this lack of pro- 
duction, but his critical, not creative, temper, far more. 
Poetry was not a passion. 

But Arnold was sensitive to his age, and the poetry 
of his youth, responsive to the intellectual voices of his 
time, was full of the questioning spirit. The philosophy 
born of new science refused to state its doctrine of 
God and man in the old forms. The new spirit of crit- 
icism was calling nothing sacred, nothing profane, mak- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 173 


ing of the most sacred facts and truths an experiment. 
And without losing his moral earnestness, his devotion 
to duty, Arnold reflected the intellectual uncertainty of 
men. In his poetry he combines a melancholy agnos- 
ticism as to the truths of revealed religion, with an 
asceticism, seen in the almost Doric plainness of his 
verse, and his stern holding to the moral truths of 
Christianity, whose spiritual truths were so uncertain 
to his mind. Arnold was under the scientific thought 
and philosophic thought of the day: that man is an 
inseparable part of the creation; the new idealism, that 
man is an expression of the all-spirit, and at times the 
thought somewhat denies the conception of personality. 


Spirit, who fillest all! 

Spirit, who utterest in each 
New-coming son of mankind 
Such of thy thoughts as thou wilt! 
O thou, one of whose moods, 
Bitter and strange, was the life 
Of Heine,—his strange, alas, 

His bitter life!—may a life 
Other and milder be mine! 

May’st thou a mood more serene, 
Happier, have utter’d in mine! 
May’st thou the rapture of peace 
Deep have embreathed at its core; 
Made it a ray of thy thought, 
Made it a beat of thy joy! 


One of his earliest poems (“To Fausta”) expresses 
his questioning view of life. 


Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows 
Like the wave! 


174 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. 
Love lends life a little grace, 
A few sad smiles; and then, 
Both are laid in one cold place, 
In the grave. 


Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die 
Like spring flowers: 
Our vaunted life is one long funeral. 
Men dig graves with bitter tears 
For their dead hopes; and all, 
Mazed with doubts and sick with fears, 
Count the hours. 


We count the hours! These dreams of ours, 
False and hollow, 
Do we go hence and find they are not dead? 
Joys we dimly apprehend, 
Faces that smiled and fled, 
Hopes born here, and born to end, 
Shall we follow? 


It is not a jaunty, light-hearted spirit of questioning. 
There is a sad Sincerity about it. Arnold feels with 
pain the loss of the simple faith of childhood. 


From the ingrain’d fashion 

Of this earthly nature 

That mars thy creature; 

From grief that is but passion, 

From mirth that is but feigning, 

From tears that bring no healing, 

From wild and weak complaining, 
Thine old strength revealing, 

Save, oh! save. 
From doubt, where all is double; 
Where wise men are not strong, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 175 


Where comfort turns to trouble, 

Where just men suffer wrong; 

Where sorrow treads on joy, 

Where sweet things soonest cloy, 

Where faiths are built on dust, 

Where love is half mistrust, 

Hungry, and barren, and sharp as the sea— 
Oh! set us free. 

O let the false dream fly, 

Where our sick souls do lie 
Tossing continually ! 


(“Stagirius” ) 


He feels the hopeless tangle of the age, and yet he is 
sure of one thing, that the only path of light is the 
way of sacrifice. The lines “In Memory of the Author 
of Obermann” tell us this. 


He who hath watch’d, not shared, the strife, 
Knows how the day hath gone. 

He only lives with the world’s life, 

Who hath renounced his own. 


No man has pictured more vividly and genuinely the 
pain of a dying faith. He had not lacked teachers who 
had shown him the high, white stars of truth, but now 
faith is 


But a dead time’s exploded dream. 


In the high Alps, in the silence of the Grande Char- 
treuse, among a people who believe, he cannot escape 
the restlessness of his own heart: 


176 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
The other powerless to be born, 

With nowhere yet to rest my head, 

Like these, on earth, I wait forlorn. 


But nowhere is the pathos of a faithless world, together 
with the clinging to love and duty as the best of life so 
wonderfully expressed as in the lines on “Dover 
Beach.” No verses are charged with truer feeling, and 
his life speaks so strongly as to attain the most perfect 
lyric form. English poetry has rarely reached such 
realism, the picture of the outer world of nature, and 
the inner world of a man’s heart. 


The sea is calm to-night. 

The tide is full, the moon lies fair 

Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light 
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, 
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. 
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! 
Only, from the long line of spray 

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land, 
Listen! you hear the grating roar 

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
At their return, up the high strand. 

Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 

The eternal note of sadness in. 


Sophocles long ago 

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought 
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow 
Of human misery; we 

Find also in the sound a thought, 
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 177 


The Sea of Faith 

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d! 

But now I only hear 

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world. 


Ah, love, let us be true 

To one another! for the world, which seems 

To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new, 

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; 

And we are here as on a darkling plain 

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 


Arnold never used criticism for the joy of seeing the 
structure of faith tumble. If he seemed largely de- 
structive, it was that the temporary might be removed, 
and religion rest upon eternal foundations. He held 
that the old forms of faith had been blown away by 
the age-spirit, and he hoped to see a truer and stronger 
faith rise in its stead. In the poem “Obermann once 
more’: the Old World before Christianity was a world 
dead in its sin: 


On that hard Pagan world disgust 
And secret loathing fell. 

Deep weariness and sated lust 
Made human life a hell. 


Christianity began to make a new world out of the 
ruins of the old: 


178 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


So well she mused, a morning broke 
Across her spirit grey; 

A conquering, new-born joy awoke, 
And fill’d her life with day. 


Arnold felt the glory of the change. He almost felt 
himself born too late. 


Oh, had I lived in that great day, 

How had its glory new 

Fill’d earth and heaven, and caught away 
My ravished spirit too! 

* * * X* * 


While we believed, on earth he went, 

And open stood his grave. 

Men call’d from chamber, church, and tent; 
And Christ was by to save. 


But that was a story of the past. Men could not have 
that faith in the light of to-day. 


Now he is dead! Far hence he lies 
In the lorn Syrian town; 

And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
The Syrian stars look down. 


But the needs of men are the same, the religious nature 
and craving are universal. There must be a Power, to 
make all things new. 


The millions suffer still, and grieve. 
And what can helpers heal 

With old-world cures men half believe 
For woes they wholly feel? 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 179 


And yet men have such need of joy! 
But joy whose grounds are true; 
And joy that should all hearts employ 
As when the past was new. 


And Arnold puts his hope into the mouth of Obermann, 
who fled to the wilderness to find rest from the weari- 
ness of the age-spirit that Arnold felt, that round his 
manhood hung the “weeds of our sad time’”— 


Despair not thou as I despair’d, 

Nor be cold gloom thy prison! 

Forward the gracious hours have fared, 
And see! the sun is risen! 


He breaks the winter of the past; 
A green, new earth appears. 
Millions, whose life in ice lay fast, 
Have thoughts, and smiles, and tears. 


What though there still need effort, strife? 
Though much be still unwon? 

Yet warm it mounts, the hour of life! 
Death’s frozen hour is done! 


That’s the hope of Arnold, but the light is never very 
clear nor the substance of his faith very firm. He was 
always a man wandering between two worlds, “the one 
dead, the other powerless to be born.” Compare 
Arnold’s sentimental sadness in “Growing Old”— 


To spend long days 
And not once feel that we were ever young,— 


with Browning’s splendid optimism born of his sturdy 
faith: 


180 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Grow old along with me! 

The best is yet to be, 

The last of life, for which the first was made: 

Our times are in His hand 

Who saith “A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, 
nor be afraid!” 


Or compare Arnold’s dim hope through mournful lines 
of his “Self-Deception” with the clear shining of 
Wordsworth’s faith in his “Immortality.” 

There is no abiding and uplifting joy in Arnold and 
there could not be with his questioning spirit, but he 
was a Christian Stoic (if two such seemingly contra- 
dictory words may be put together), and the great mes- 
sage of his life was duty, and he was an unflinching 
example of it. And under duty he would include truth 
and work and love. 

He felt the glory of loving service. He had mo- 
ments when his heart fully responded to the life of 
faith. Witness his “East London”: 


’Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, 
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen 
In Spitalfields, look’d thrice dispirited. 


I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 

“Tll and o’erwork’d, how fare you in this scene?” 
“Bravely!” said he; “for I of late have been 

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.” 


O human soul! as long as thou canst so 
Set up a mark of everlasting light, 
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 181 


To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam— 
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night! 
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home. 


He felt the greatness of his father’s faith and life, 
and “Rugby Chapel” is the tribute of a reverent and 
loyal son. He himself was only a storm-beaten figure 
who had hardly fought himself through to the lonely 
inn ’mid the rocks. 


Friends, companions, and train, 
The avalanche swept from our side. 


But the son feels that his father, the great school- 
master of Rugby is a more heroic figure. 


But thou would’st not alone 
Be saved, my father! alone 
Conquer and come to thy goal, 
Leaving the rest in the wild. 
We were weary, and we 
Fearful, and we in our march 
Fain to drop down and to die. 
Still thou turnedst, and still 
Gavest the weary thy hand. 


If, in the paths of the world, 
Stones might have wounded thy feet, 
Toil or dejection have tried 
Thy spirit, of that we saw 
Nothing—to us thou wast still 
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm! 
Therefore to thee it was given 
Many to save with thyself; 
And, at the end of thy day, 

O faithful shepherd! to come, 
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand. 


~ 


182 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Matthew Arnold lived too much in the mists and 
storms of the questioning spirit to be the shepherd of 
others, but it is pleasant to think of him as gaining 
the shelter of the fold at last. His conduct was gov- 
erned by deeply religious motives, he did not neglect 
the offices of religion because his critical reason could 
not always accept as truth the creed of the Church, 
and he claimed as his inheritance the great traditions 
of fellowship and of worship. 

The last Sunday of his life he was staying with a 
friend in Liverpool and went with his host to the morn- 
ing service at the Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, 
of which Dr. John Watson was then pastor. He stayed 
to the communion service at which Watts’ hymn was 
sung, 


When I survey the wondrous Cross. 


He was deeply impressed with the combined simplicity 
and reverence of the Scotch communion and said to 
his friend on the way home that he thought Watts’ 
hymn the noblest hymn in the English language. And 
as he went up the stairs to his room one of the servants 
in the hall heard him quietly repeating to Himself, 


When I survey the wondrous Cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 
My richest gain I count but loss, 

And pour contempt on all my pride. 


CEA RTE Riibx, 
Poets of Doubt and Demial 





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CHAPTER IX 
POETS OF DOUBT AND DENIAL 


In Browning’s philosophy, his attempt to reconcile 
human sin and misery with a goal of infinite love, he 
says that evil may be the foil of good, as light needs 
shade. It is certain that we shall feel the beauty and 
glory of the spring as they cannot understand who live 
in sunny climes. The winter of our discontent shall 
give place to glorious summer. 

English poetry has its moods, and we must go 
through all of them to understand its message. In the 
last chapter we dwelt in the twilight shade of Arnold’s 
questioning spirit. Now we must enter the deepening 
shadows of doubt and denial, until we are in the black 
midnight of the soul. We shall console ourselves with 
the thought that morning cometh. 


z 


Arthur Hugh Clough was associated all his too brief 
life with Matthew Arnold. They were schoolboys to- 
gether at Rugby; they went to the same university; 
they had many noble friendships in common; they 
loved the same scenes and storied places ; they had many 
similar ideals, and they finally engaged in the same life- 
work. They were both sensitive and true and deeply 

185 


~ 


186 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


religious. Reverencing truth and their own souls, they 
met the critical influences hostile to old faiths without 
flinching, yet often sore perplexed. They were like 
ships in the teeth of wind and wave, stoutly weather- 
ing the gale, but with stripped decks and rent cordage 
and driven far from their course. 

Matthew Arnold has connected the life of Clough 
with the story of the scholar-gypsy, the tradition of the 
university man, weary of the world of thought, reac- 
ing from the hopeless effort to penetrate the problem 
of life, giving it all up and following the care-free life 
of a gypsy. That’s only one phase of Clough, but it 
does interpret the revulsion of mind from too much 
thinking. “Thyrsis,” the beautiful elegy that Arnold 
wrote on the death of Clough, continues the figure 
blended with the early and sweet note of nature. 


What though the music of thy rustic flute 

Kept not for long its happy, country tone; 

Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note 

Of men contention-tost, of men who groan, 

Which task’d thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat— 
It failed, and thou wast mute! 

Yet hadst thou alway visions of our light, 

And long with men of care thou couldst not stay, 

And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way, 

Left human haunt, and on alone till night. 


Clough was a favorite pupil of Thomas Arnold and 
easily won all the honors that Rugby could give. He 
went up to Oxford with the promise of a most brilliant 
career, but failed to win the coveted place at Balliol, 
though afterward elected a fellow of Oriel. It was 
the restless heart, the uncertainty at the foundations of 
life, that withheld for him the rightful completion of 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY _ 187 


his powers, that stayed his career short of its highest 
and fullest expression. Life was too intense. He 
thought too much without the natural relief and balance 
of action. He felt the pressure of moral responsibility 
too early. He made an impossible demand upon his 
own nature and upon Christian truth. His business 
was to find truth, and until he could have the certainty 
of truth under the new conditions, he could have no 
assured faith. He regarded life too intently as a prob- 
lem to be thought out, instead of a simple duty to be 
acted out. 

And when Clough was at Oxford, the influence of 
John Henry Newman was at its height. It was in- 
tensely religious and a reaction from progressive 
thought in the Church and in the State. It was a 
religious and political Toryism. Newman and the Ox- 
ford Movement stood for authority in creed and 
Church. It would admit of no religion apart from 
dogmatic belief. And here was the very difficulty of 
men like Arnold and Clough. To their minds scientific 
and historical criticism had affected the facts on which 
the creeds were built. The truth of religion must be 
found not in the creeds of the Church but in the expe- 
rience of the soul. Clough’s mind reacted from all 
authority. He did not believe that any group of minds 
could ever fix the form cf truth. Matthew Arnold 
found more relief in action, in literature and society 
and public life. The uncertainty of faith was not such 
a malady of soul. But Clough’s more contemplative 
life, and its narrower interest, made the inner world 
of thought supreme, and in that inner world the vital 
question was one of faith. He always had the attitude 
of the learner. “Reverent waiting for light not yet 
given, respect for the truth so absolute that nothing 


188 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


doubtful can be accepted as truth because it is pleasant 
to the soul” made the waiting painful in the uncertain 
theories and confused thinking of his day. “He never 
denied the reality of much that he himself could not 
use as spiritual nutriment. He believed that God spoke 
differently to different ages and different minds. Not 
therefore could he lay aside his own duty of seeking 
and waiting.” 

As a fellow and tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, 
Clough had to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of 
the Church of England. The thought of the slightest 
intellectual insincerity did not add to his peace of mind. 
And the life in Oxford, agreeable as much of it was 
to his intellectual and social tastes, he felt as a sort 
of repression. The meeting with Mr. Ralph Waldo 
Emerson in 1847, whose writings found a kindred 
spirit, and the forming of an intimate friendship with 
this sturdiest of non-conformists, was a strong influ- 
ence on Clough towards freedom and independence. 
And he resigned his Oxford living and became prin- 
cipal of University Hall, London, largely under con- 
trol of Unitarians. But he did not find here the free- 
dom which his questioning spirit craved. With Clough, 
it was not so much the questioning of old forms, as 
the quest of truth. And he found the dogmatism of 
denial quite as intolerant and irksome as the dogmatism 
of assertion. He gave up his London work and came to 
America to try a new life. He found a home in Cam- 
bridge and busied himself with pupils and in writing 
for reviews. His short stay in this country was not 
notable for the work he did, but for the friends he 
made, and the impress he made upon them of his pure 
and gifted nature. Mr. Lowell, in his tribute to 
Agassiz, has caught the very features of Clough, the 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY © 189 


picture of the man’s soul, as he appeared to that noble 
group of poets and thinkers and friends. 


And he our passing guest, 

Shy nature, too, and stung with life’s unrest, 
Whom we too briefly had but could not hold, 
* * * 

Boy face, but grave with answerless desires, 

Poet in all that poets have of best, 
But foiled with riddles dark and cloudy aims. 


Mr. Clough was called back to England by the offer 
of a place in the Education Office, and he spent his 
remaining years, like Matthew Arnold, in the difficult 
and practical work of building up a people’s education 
for England. He married and had a happy home; 
children grew up around him, and though the short 
years were in much weakness and a constant fight for 
life, the restless heart knew what joy meant and the 
questioning spirit found some truth precious. He was 
not now breaking his heart over endless and fruitless 
speculation, but was able to rest somewhat in the deep 
spiritual facts of life. Before this the mind had been 
too free to deal with the spiritual problems of the 
world. Now practical duties calmed the spirit and 
led him into practical faith, if not into unquestioned 
belief. 

I have rehearsed these simple facts of Clough’s life, 
for without them the message of his poetry cannot be 
understood. No poet is more personal in his verse. 
And for this reason he has never been read by many, 
but by a few he has been greatly loved in proportion 
as they have found their own lives interpreted by his 
self-revelations. 


- 


190 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Clough is buried close by Wordsworth in the little 
Churchyard at Grasmere, and in his love of nature he 
was a pupil of Wordsworth. He had the same love of 
lonely places ; nature spoke to his heart, and he brooded 
over the impress that nature made upon him. But his 
real world was within. He felt the pathos of the 
world’s struggle and poverty and pain, and he had the 
vision of a new world fairer and happier. He felt the 
call of the wider brotherhood. But the chief problem 
of life was in his own heart. And his chief interest for 
the student of life and literature is in that he mirrors 
so fully the wonder and query and quest of a sensitive 
and sincere mind at the new facts and philosophies of 
life that refuse to be stated in the old terms of faith. 

All testify to the beauty of his soul and the purity 
of his character. A more naturally devout man never 
lived. Religion was his life. Yet religion had rested 
upon certain teachings of the Bible and the Church. 
If these teachings were discredited or changed what 
could give the soul the sense of God and the divine 
authority for conduct? He would believe and yet he 
would only believe on sufficient grounds. He would 
not make his judgment blind. He would not force the 
assent of his soul. And he could not answer the call 
of men until he had settled the supreme question of 
faith. And so through all his early manhood Clough 
questioned and balanced and wavered. The creative 
power of the poet missed the impulse and joy of clear 
vision. He was less of a poet because of this endless 
quest of the intellect. His sympathy for human need 
missed the motive of positive faith. He served less 
because he could not take one step until the whole way 
was made plain. He was indeed a “perturbed spirit,” 
the Hamlet among poets. He often felt 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY _ Ig1 


The time is out of joint; O cursed spite! 
That ever I was born to set it right. 


His early poems constantly reflect his restless spirit. 


How often sit I, poring o’er 

My strange distorted youth, 

Seeking in vain, in all my store, 

One feeling based on truth; 

Amid the maze of petty life 

A clue whereby to move, 

A spot whereon in toil and strife 

To dare to rest and love. 

So constant as my heart would be, 
So fickle as it must, 

*Twere well for others as for me 

*T were dry as summer dust. 
Excitements come, and act and speech 
Flow freely forth;—but no, 

Nor they, nor aught beside can reach 
The buried world below. 


Though knowledge is uncertain, though the mind strug- 
gles in vain for the certitude of faith, life moves on, 
it is a part of the stream ever “descending to the sea.” 


O end to which our currents tend, 
Inevitable sea, 

To which we flow, what do we know, 
What shall we guess of thee? 


A roar we hear upon thy shore, 
As we our course fulfil; 
Scarce we divine a sun will shine 
And be above us still. 
(“The Stream of Life’’) 


7 


192 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


This earthly life must be followed. There may be little 
joyful light upon it, but duty is ours, the duty of rela- 
tionships and work. And though we may not have 
the beckoning of a clear-shining goal, we must follow 
on in the trust that we shall arrive. 


Whate’er you dream with doubt possessed, 
Keep, keep it snug within your breast, 
And lay you down and take your rest; 
Forget in sleep the doubt and pain, 

And when you wake, to work again. 

The wind it blows, the vessel goes, 

And where and wither, no one knows. 


’T will all be well: no need of care; 

Though how it will, and when and where, 

We can not see, and can’t declare. 

In spite of dreams, in spite of thought, 

’Tis not in vain, and not for naught, 

The wind it blows, the ship it goes, 

Though where and whither, no one knows. 
(“All’s Well”) 


The questioning spirit that gives a tone of melancholy 
to all the earlier work of Clough, sometimes gathers 
thick clouds and shuts down upon the path and hides 
all hope. That is true of “Easter Day,” written in 
Naples in 1849. 


Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; 

As of the unjust, also of the just— 
Yea, of that Just One, too! 

This is the one sad Gospel that is true— 
Christ is not risen! 


* * 2K 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 193 


Eat, drink and die, for we are souls bereaved: 
Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope 
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope, 
And most beliefless, that had most believed. 
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; 
As of the unjust, also of the just— 
Yea, of that Just One, too! 
It is the one sad Gospel that is true— 
Christ is not risen! 


* 2 rs * mB 


Here, on our Easter Day 
We rise, we come, and lo; we find Him not, 
Gardner nor other, on the sacred spot: 
Where they have laid Him there is none to say: 
No sound, nor in, nor out—no word 
Of where to seek the dead or meet the living Lord. 
There is no glistering of an angel’s wings, 
There is no voice of heavenly clear behest: 
Let us go hence, and think upon these things 

In silence, which is best. 

Is He not risen? No— 

But lies and moulders low? 

Christ is not risen? 


You notice that the poem does not end with the nega- 
tive of denial, but with the interrogative of uncertainty, 
through which the heart will speak its hope. And when, 
as I have said, Clough had regular work that engaged 
his best powers and was felt to be of large service to 
his fellows; above all when he had a happy home and 
interests that won his heart, the intellectual problems 
of religion were no longer considered apart from the 
life of love and obedience. He did not then throw 
himself against the limitations of knowledge and recoil 
bruised and bleeding, and he found much of the rest 


194 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


of Him who is meek and lowly of heart, and who 
has taught that love is the school of the highest knowl- 
edge. 

The second “Easter Day” has a different spirit. 


So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone, 
I with my secret self held communing of mine own. 
So in the southern city spake the tongue 
Of one that somewhat overwildly sung, 
But in a later hour I sat and heard 
Another voice that spake—and this graver word. 
Weep not, it bade, whatever hath been said, 
Though He be dead, He is not dead. 

In the true creed 

He is yet risen indeed; 

Christ is yet risen. 


The spirit of hope could never die out, the precious 
heritage of his white soul, the comrade of his life of 
love. Thomas Arnold speaks of the beautiful poem 
beginning 


Say not the struggle naught availeth, 


that it was written during his last illness in Italy, in his 
vain search for health. In his collected poems it is the 
last, but dated 1849. And Mr. Stopford Brooke speaks 
of it as the product of his earlier days, and of the hope- 
ful spirit that could not perish. It is the most precious 
verse of Clough, and prophesies of what he might have 
done had he lived with a freer spirit. 


Say not the struggle naught availeth, 
The labor and the wounds are vain, 
The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
And as things have been they remain. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 195 


If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; 
It may be, in yon smoke concealed, 
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers, 
And, but for you, possess the field. 


For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, 
Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 


And not by Eastern windows only, 

When daylight comes, comes in the light, 
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, 
But westward, look, the land is bright. 


“What the image suggested became true as the years 
of the century went on. It is even truer now. We 
have a closer, more faithful grasp on truth than Clough 
could have; we have a diviner and a clearer hope. And 
what the last verse says was realized also, one is glad 
to think, in his own life.” (S. Brooke, p. 51.) 


II 
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY (1849-1903) 


Mr. Henley has made his impress by the spirit of 
his poetry rather than the richness of its thought or 
the perfection of its form. He has left but one thin 
volume—though I think many stray pieces have not 
been collected—but that volume has gone through many 
editions because it finds the heart that loves the world 
and feels its beauty, that loves life and wishes to play 
the man, yet feels the pathos of its mystery and incom- 
pleteness and tragedy. It is the purpose to find the 
utmost beauty and joy out of the brief and painful life 


1G6 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


of man, to know human love and duty in the face of 
the unknowable and immeasurable forces of the world, 
to preserve the self inviolate, to have the unconquerable 
will in the clutch of circumstance, that has made Hen- 
ley’s poems the personal message to so many men of 
our time. 

Clough was essentially a religious poet. As I have 
said, a soul more naturally devout never lived. And 
his songs were always about himself, about the prob- 
lems of God and duty as they affected his own life. 
It was the inner problem on which he was ever thinking. 
And this makes his peculiar charm as likewise his weak- 
ness and limitation. But God and the spiritual world 
were mysterious facts to him, not a great perhaps. 
How he should understand these facts in the light of 
modern knowledge was the question. He never lost 
hope that the truth could be found, but could it be 
through the historic forms in which he had been 
trained? Clough, like Arnold, was a poet of the ques- 
tioning spirit. 

But Henley went a step farther. There is no trace 
in his poems of the struggle after religious truth. 
Neither is there any blank and defiant denial. God 
and the immortal life are beyond his knowledge. There 
is no evidence that the heavens have been opened. On 
every side is the wall of the sensible and material 
through which man cannot go in his search for truth. 
But this life we have, short and troubled, a vale between 
two eternities. It is yet a spiritual life; the spirit of 
man is the chief force in it. How shall we regard it? 
And what shall we make of it? This is the message 
of Henley. He is the poet of the agnostic spirit. 

Henley devoted himself to literature as poet and 
critic. His early work was associated with Robert 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 197 


Louis Stevenson in the writing of plays. But this 
rather uncertain living led him to journalism as a 
vocation. He became successively the editor of a mag- 
azine of art, the National Observer, and the New Re- 
view. He compiled the “Lyra Heroica,”’ an anthology 
of English verse for boys, and also wrote a dictionary 
of slang. 

His poems are unequal, passing from pure music, 
the love and joy of life, such as— 


It was a bowl of roses: 

There in the light they lay, 

Languishing, glorying, glowing 

Their life away. 

And the soul of them rose like a presence, 

Into me crept and grew, 

And filled me with something, someone, 
O, was it you?— 


to the stirring, rugged verse, calls to duty and heroism, 
as in the patriotic lyric to R. F. B., closing with the 
stanzas: 


Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade and 
die, 

While the living stars fulfil their round in the living sky? 

For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their father’s 
debt, 

And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw was set; 

And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that none shall 
brave, 

Is but less strong than Time and the great, all-whelming 
grave. 


Or in the more personal lyric, closing with the lines: 


198 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Life—give me life until the end, 

That at the very top of being, 

The battle spirit shouting in my blood, 
Out of the reddest hell of the fight 

I may be snatched and flung 

Into the everlasting lull, 

The immortal, incommunicable dream. 


And then there is sometimes the rough, unmusical real- 
ism that comes from “nervous impressionism.” The 
series of poems, “In a Hospital,” is full of these vivid 
touches. The twenty-fifth is “Apparition,” perhaps the 
most interesting, because it is supposed to apply to 
R. L. Stevenson. 


Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, 
Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face— 
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, 
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity— 
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
Of passion and impudence and energy. 
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 

Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist: 

A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, 

And something of the Shorter-Catechist. 


This description of Stevenson suggests Henley’s 
fondness for blunt truth. He published in the Pall 
Mall Gazette a criticism of Balfour’s “Life of Steven- 
son.” “I take a view of Stevenson which declines to 
be concerned with this seraph in chocolate, this barley- 
sugar effigy of a real man.” Then he gave a catalog 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 199 


of his failings, which he felt was a vindication of his 
friend. He was equally frank concerning Burns, call- 
ing him an inspired poet, but also a lewd peasant, and 
a cad. 

In a narrow sphere Henley was a poet of vivid im- 
pression and strong, impulsive expression. But he was 
without the patience and balance to make his work the 
highest art. This lack of patience and thoroughness 
that hinder the balanced critic and the growth of the 
poet is no doubt connected with the lack of the larger 
vision that belonged to faith. He did not walk humbly 
before a world he could not understand. He refused 
to believe what he could not see. He mistook his per- 
sonal expressions for the limit of the truth. 

There is no hope in Henley, and the joy is chiefly the 
memory of the joy that has been, a kind of Stoic joy, 
a faint blush of light at the close of a dark and stormy 
day. There is sweetness and beauty, but it is clothed 
in sackcloth. 


Life is bitter. All the faces of the years, 

Young and old, are gray with travail and with tears. 

Must we only wake to toil, to tire, to weep? 

In the sun, among the leaves, upon the flowers, 

Slumber stills to dreamy death the heavy hours,— 
Let me sleep. 


Riches won but mock the old, unable years; 

Fame’s a pear! that hides beneath a sea of tears; 

Love must wither, or must live alone and weep. 

In the sunshine, through the leaves, across the flowers, 

While we slumber, death approaches through the hours— 
Let me sleep. 


Henley knew what wedded love meant and he must 
have known a true home, and the heaven-sent life of a 


200 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


little child, and there is hardly anything more pathetic 
than the Epilogue to the volume, where the heart-break- 
ing loss of a child is treated with the faintest shadow 
of hope. 


These, to you now, O, more than ever now— 
Now that the ancient enemy 
Has passed, and we, we two that are one, have seen 
A piece of perfect life 
Turn to so ravishing a shape of death. 
The Arch-Discomforter might well have smiled 
In pity and pride, 
Even as he bore his lovely and innocent spoil 
From those home-kingdoms he left desolate! 
Poor windlestraws 
On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time 
And Chance and Change, I knew! 
But they are yours, as I am, till we attain 
That end for which we make, we two that are one: 
A little, exquisite ghost 
Between us, smiling with the serenest eyes 
Seen in this world, and calling, calling still 
In that clear voice whose infinite subtleties 
Of sweetness, thrilling back across the SE 
Break this poor heart to hear :— 

“Come, Dadsie, come! 
Mama, how long,—how long!” 


Henley was a strong, tender, brave man, if some- 
what too self-confident and defiant, and the most char- 
acteristic note and the best note is the call to life and 
duty. 


Some starlit garden gray with dew, 
Some chamber flushed with wine and fire, 
What matters where, so I and you 

Are worthy our desire? 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 201 


Behind, a past that scolds and jeers 

For ungirt loins and lamps unlit; 

In front, the unmanageable years, 
The trap upon the Pit; 


Think on the shame of dreams for deeds, 
The scandal of unnatural strife, 
The slur upon immortal needs, 

The treason done to life: 


Arise! no more a living lie, 

And with me quicken and control 

Some memory that shall magnify 
The universal soul. 


Life itself is great and worthy, and his motto would be, 
“To thyself be true.” And the individual is bound with 
others and his highest motive is to “magnify the uni- 
versal soul.” This is the thought in the noble tribute 
to his mother : 


Dearest, live on 

In such an immortality 

As we thy sons, 

Born of thy body and nursed 

At those wild, faithful breasts, 

Can give—of generous thoughts, 

And honorable words, and deeds 

That make men half in love with fate! 

Live on, O brave and true, 

In us thy children, in ours whose life is thine— 
Our best and theirs! What is that best but thee— 
Thee, and thy gift to us, to pass 

Like light along the infinite of space 

To the immitigable end? 


In all his poetry is the assertion of the individual. 
Where in poetry is there a more triumphant and defiant 


~ 


202 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


tone of individualism than in Henley’s tribute to Mr. 
Hamilton Bruce! 


Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever Gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 


In the fell clutch of circumstance 
I have not winced nor cried aloud, 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 


Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the horror of the shade, 
And yet the menace of the years 
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 


It matters not how strait the gate, 

How charged with punishments the scroll; 
I am the master of my fate: 

I am the captain of my soul. 


The triumphant or gloomy individualism, the spirit 
of a Henley or of Davidson and Thomson, is not the 
whole truth of life. It is a partial because self-centered 
view. No man can be a man alone. Life is also a 
matter of relationships. We find that fullest realization 
of self as we enter into the larger life of the race. And 
that life has a direction and a force not ourselves into 
which we are to enter with humility and desire. Over 
against the dauntless egoism of Henley, or the black 
pessimism of Davidson or Thomson, I would put the 
reverent altruism of John Oxenham, one of the poets 
of the new day, inferior in verse, but great in faith. 
It was written for New Year’s Day, I1g1o. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 203 


Each man is captain of his soul, 
And each man his own crew, 
And the Pilot knows the unknown seas, 
And He will bring us through. 
We break new seas to-day,— 
Our eager keels quest unaccustomed waters, 
And, from the vast uncharted waste in front, 
The mystic circles leap 
_ To greet our prows with mightiest possibilities: 
Bringing us—what? 
—Dread shoals and shifting banks, 
And calms and storms, 
And clouds and biting gales, 
And wreck and loss, 
And valiant fighting times? 
And, maybe death !—and so, the Larger Life! 


For should the Pilot deem it best 
To cut the voyage short, 
He sees beyond the skyline, and 
He’ll bring us into Port. 


And, maybe, life,—life on a bounding tide, 
And chance of glorious deeds; 
—Of help swift-borne to drowning mariners, 
Of cheer to ships dismasted in the gale, 
Of succours given unasked and joyfully, 
Of mighty service to all needy souls. 


So,—Ho for the Pilot’s orders, 
Whatever course He makes! 
For He sees beyond the sky line, 
And He never makes mistakes. 


And, maybe, Golden Days, 
Full-freighted with delight! 
—And wide, free seas of unimagined bliss, 
And Treasure-Isles and kingdoms to be won, 
And Undiscovered Countries and new kin. 


- 


204 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


For each man captains his own soul, 
And chooses his own crew, 

But the Pilot knows the unknown seas, 
And He will bring us through. 


The other poets of whom I must briefly speak, John 
Davidson and James Thomson, did not live out half 
their days. They had genuine gifts of the poet and 
they began life with fair hopes and beautiful promise, 
but the days darkened round them and they went fast 
glooming to the end. 


III 


John Davidson (1857-1909) has many volumes of 
poems and plays to his name. He was the son of a 
Scotch minister, nurtured on porridge and poverty, who 
was put to work at thirteen, finally returned to school 
and became a pupil teacher, at last followed his demon, 
turned to literature, and to London as the center of life 
and art, voiced his many visions and experiences of joy 
and sorrow, and was overwhelmed by the forces he 
voiced but could not master. “Fleet Street Eclogues,” 
First and Second Series, are the best known of his 
many volumes, poems patterned after Spenser’s “Shep- 
herd’s Calendar.” They are full of poetic and even 
fantastic contrasts, dark questionings of the meanings 
of life, pathetic pictures of social failure and wretched- 
ness with idyllic touches of English scenery and life and 
the spirit of joyous abandon and hope. The eclogue 
on “St. George’s Day” will give the pathetic and fan- 
tastic contrast of song and sorrow, the beauty of the 
English landscape and the foul ugliness of want and 
sin. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 205 


Of the earlier poems, Mr. Richard LeGallienne, the 
English poet and critic now living in New York, said 
in 1894, “Mr. Davidson is a personality as well as a 
poet. Take up any one of his books and before you 
have had time to differentiate its qualities, you are 
aware of a masculine authoritative presence. There is 
a burliness of constitution underlying his most delicate 
fanciful work. Its beauty is that best beauty which is 
the blossom of robust deep-rooted health; and its 
sweetness is that sweetness which is hived in the hearts 
of strong men. . . . We never lose faith in the prom- 
ised land to which in the form of a magnum opus I 
have no doubt Mr. Davidson is leading us.”’ These are 
appreciative words and thoroughly capable and honest. 
But John Davidson never entered the promised land 
predicted; he literally died in the desert. He was a 
man of the finest feeling and humanity: he was deeply 
and sorely touched by the feeling of human burdens 
and infirmities, but he stood alone where he could not 
see or help the fairer structure building,—he could only 
see the scaffolding and hear the cries of the workmen 
and be choked with the dust that filled the air. 

I think he has drawn a true portrait of himself in 
“A Ballad in Blank Verse.” 


No creed for me! I am a man apart: 

A mouth piece for the creeds of all the world; 
A soulless life that angels may possess 

Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things 
May loll at ease beside the loveliest; 

A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; 

The slave of every passion; and the slave 

Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; 

A trembling lyre for every wind to sound. 


= 


206 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


All of Davidson’s poems are of marked individuality 
and realism, but the later poems grew more philosophi- 
cal and social and were tinged with a gloomy pessimism. 
His spirit is expressed in the Eclogue, “All Hallows 
Byer 


In Elfland is no rest, 

But rumour and stir and endless woe 
Of the unfulfilled behest— 

The doleful yoke of the Elfinfolk 
Since first the sun went west. 


The cates they eat and the wine they drink, 
Savourless nothings are; 

The hopes they cherish, the thoughts they think 
Are neither near nor far; 

And well they know they cannot go 

Even to a desert star; 


One planet is all their poor estate, 

Though a million systems roll; 

They are dogged and worried, early and late, 
As the demons nag a soul, 

By the moon and the sun, for they never can shun 
Time’s tyrannous control. 


The promise of his youth did not seem’ fulfilled by 
his manhood and he fell into great poverty and mental 
depression and finally in 1909 he took his own life. 
He disappeared, and an unpublished volume of poems 
was found in his room, “Fleet Street Poems,” with a 
note, “This will be my last book.” The body was found 
several weeks after on the shore of the North Sea. 


IV 


James Thomson (1834-1882), author of “The City 
of Dreadful Night,” is doubtless the most tragic figure 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 207 


in our recent poetry. He was a waif; he never knew 
his own parents, and he seemed like a bit of driftwood 
on the stream of life. He was brought up in the Cale- 
donian Asylum at Glasgow, became an army teacher 
and was finally dismissed for breach of discipline. He 
was associated with Charles Bradlaugh in his secularist 
teachings, and in such periodicals he found his first 
literary work. He had no faith in religious truth, in 
God, the soul, and immortality. He was deeply pessi- 
mistic as regards life, under black depression concern- 
ing himself, a dipsomaniac, and died in great poverty 
and misery. George Meredith thinks that the taking 
away of poverty from his burdens would in all likeli- 
hood have saved him. He speaks of his brave heart, 
and says that “he had, almost past example in my expe- 
rience, the thrill of the worship of valiancy as well as 
of sensuous beauty.” And again he says: “He was a 
man of big heart, of such entire sincereness that he 
wrote directly from the impressions carved in him 
by his desolate experience of life. Nothing is fig- 
ured; all is positive. No Inferno could be darker. 
But the poetical effect of a great part of the poems 
is that of a litany of the vaults below.” (Letters, ii. 
437-) 

It is certain that the work of James Thomson can- 
not be omitted in any study of the message of modern 
English poetry. The poems are noteworthy for their 
gloomy power. The gloom pervades “Master Tene- 
brarum,” lighted up with the faintest ray of hope, the 
love of a pure and gentle and beautiful soul. Had 
that ray of love only been followed, it might have 
led as in the case of Tennyson to the “ineffable 
light.” The poem “Night” suggests the lines of 
Tennyson, 


208 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


An infant crying in the night 
And with no language but a cry— 


only this is a man’s cry who has lost his way in the 
impenetrable night. 

In the fourteenth poem of “The City of Dreadful 
Night” we have the climax of the sad sincerity and 
tragic pathos of Thomson’s unbelief,—the great cathe- 
dral, the waiting throng, the message from its pulpit,— 
no faith, no worship, no God. 


Who know we shall not reach the promised land; 
Perhaps a mirage glistening through our tears. 
* * * * * 


But if it prove a mirage after all! 

Our last illusion leaves us wholly bare, 

To bruise against fate’s adamantine wall, 
Consumed or frozen in the pitiless air; 
In all our world, beneath, around, above, 
Our only refuge, solace, triumph,—Love, 
Sole star of light in infinite black despair. 


Matthew Arnold’s artistic expression of an age-tendency 
was Thomson’s settled and fixed despair. It was 


The sense that every struggle brings defeat 
Because fate holds no prize to crown success; 
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat 

Because they have no secret to express; 

That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain 
Because there is no light beyond the curtain; 
That all is vanity and nothingness. 


It is a sad world we have been passing through, and 
yet it cannot be to us what it was to Thomson; for we 
know that outside there is a world of light. 


GEE ADT Rea 


Poets of the Dawn 


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POETS OF THE DAWN 


In the last chapter, it was a sad and uncertain world 
in which we were traveling, however sincere,—the night 
with feeble starlight, in which it was hard to find the: 
way. But the soul of man cannot long live on nega- 
tions. No creative impulses of imagination can come 
to a life flat along the earth, with no ladder reaching 
heavenward on which angels of God ascend and de- 
scend. The study of English poetry only confirms the 
optimism of Browning,— 


My own hope is, a sun will pierce 

The thickest cloud. earth ever stretched; 

That, after last, returns the first, 

Though a wide compass round be fetched; 

That what began best, can’t end worst, 

Nor what God blest once, prove accurst. 
(“Apparent Failure”) 


Slowly the faint light grows until color suffuses the 
dawn, and the day is at hand. 


I 


William Watson might be called the poet of the 
early dawn, the twilight dawn. He is something of a 
211 


212 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


critic of life. He still has the questioning spirit of 
Arnold and Clough, and something of their persistent 
melancholy, but in his best moments with far more 
courage and hope. It is the prophecy of day. It is the 
turn of the tide, to change the figure. With Henley and 
Davidson and Thomson, you heard “its melancholy, 
long, withdrawing roar.” Life was like the naked 
shingles of the world. Life seemed to have “Nor 
certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” But now 
the sea of faith turns, and once more it shall be at 
the full, and men like seaweed on its sands shall drink 
in its life-giving food. 

William Watson is never in love with melody alone; 
he must have serious and high thought, but the thought 
is held so strongly as to make simple and natural verse 
its inevitable form. The serious grappling with prob- 
lems, the effort to interpret life does not lessen, but 
makes more essential the music of verse. He never, 
like Browning, loses the poet in the philosopher. He 
has not the varied music of Alfred Noyes, but he has 
wonderful power of phrase, etching a portrait with the 
fewest strokes, a condensed but vivid interpretation of 
character. That’s the test of the real artist; not another 
word needed or a different word possible. That’s where 
the best of English writers excel us: they use one word 
where we are tempted to use a score. 

Only Sir Henry Newbolt can surpass Watson in 
vivid condensation. Could anything be truer or more 
complete than this characterization of Shelley, in a 
single stanza: 


Impatient of the world’s fixed way, 
He ne’er could suffer God’s delay, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 213 


But all the future in a day 
Would build divine, 

And the whole past in ruins lay, 
An emptied shrine. 


And the influence of Wordsworth he has drawn in 
briefest lines: 


Rest! ’twas the gift he gave: and peace! the shade 
- He spread, for spirits fevered with the sun. 


There is a bit of self-revelation in the lines to Edward 
Dowden (on receiving the life of Shelley), and we see 
how Watson passed through periods of passion and 
melody to the simple and pure beauty of spiritual vision. 
He speaks first of Shelley, then of Keats and finally of 
his real master Wordsworth. 


In my young days of fervid poesy 

He drew me to him with his strange, far light,— 
He held me in a world all clouds and gleams, 

And vasty phantoms, where ev’n man himself 
Moved like a phantom ’mid the clouds and gleams. 
Anon the earth recalled me, and a voice 
Murmuring of dethroned divinities, 

And dead times deathless upon sculptured urn— 
And Philomela’s long-descended pain 

Flooding the night—and maidens of romance 

To whom asleep St. Agnes’ love-dreams come— 
Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse 

And thraldom, lapping me in high content, 

Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms. 

And then a third voice, long unheeded—held 
Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame— 
Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang 

Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, 

Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, 


~ 


214 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; 

And from the homely matter nigh at hand 
Ascending and dilating, it disclosed 

Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths 
Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass 
With roots that groped about eternity, 

And in each drop of dew upon each blade 

The mirror of the inseparable All. 

The first voice, then the second, in their turns 
Had sung me captive. This voice sang me free. 
Therefore, above all vocal sons of men, 

Since him whose sightless eyes saw hell and heaven, 
To Wordsworth be my homage, thanks, and love. 


Though the mind of Watson often questions, the 
heart is inclined to choose the best. 


The grace of friendship—mind and heart 
Linked with their fellow heart and mind; 
The gains of science, gifts of art; 

The sense of oneness with our kind; 

The thirst to know and understand— 

A large and liberal discontent ; 

These are the goods in life’s rich hand, 
The things that are more excellent. ' 


* * * * * 


Though dark, O God, thy course and track, 
I think Thou must at least have meant 
That naught which lives should wholly lack 
The things that are more excellent. 


He is not content with doubt. If he cannot believe, 
it lessens the joy of the feast. There is an apparition 
behind the festal glow— 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 215 


And ah, to know not, while with friends I sit, 
And while the purple joy is passed about, 
Whether ’tis ampler day divinelier lit 
Or homeless night without; 


And whether, stepping forth, my soul shall see 
New prospects, or fall sheer—a blinded thing! 
There is, O grave, thy hourly victory, 
And there, O death, thy sting. | 
(“The Great Misgiving”’) 


He has moments when his spirit attains to something 
like faith. He feels the divine renewal of the earth 
and would mingle his own note with the glad song of 
the Spring. 


I too have come through wintry terrors,—yea, 

Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul 

Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring, 

Me also, dimly with new life hath touched, 

And with regenerate hope, the salt of life; 

And I would dedicate these thankful tears 

To whatsoever Power beneficent, 

Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his thought, 

Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth 

Into the gracious air and vernal morn, 

And suffers me to know my spirit a note 

Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream 

And voiceful mountain,—nay, a string, how jarred 

And all but broken! of that lyre of life 

Whereon himself, the master harp-player, 

Resolving all its mortal dissonance 

To one immortal and most perfect strain, 

Harps without pause, building with song the world. 
(“Vita Nuova”) 


216 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Watson, like all the younger poets, has the vision 
of a fairer, juster world than we now know. 


The New Age stands as yet 
Half built against the sky, 
Open to every threat 
Of storms that clamor by; 
Scaffolding veils the walls, 
And dim dust floats and falls, 
As moving to and fro, their tasks the masons ply. 


He has the spirit and hope of the new democracy, 
and holds that religion is only the mummery of priests, 
if it fails to heal the open sores of the world. Take the 
“Thoughts on Revisiting a Centre of Commerce where 
a Vast Cathedral Church is being Erected” (he refers 
to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York 
City) : 


City of merchants, lords of trade and gold, 
Traffickers great as they that bought and sold 
When ships of Tarshish came to Tyre of old; 

City of festering streets by misery trod, 

Where half-fed, half-clad children swarm unshod, 
While thou dost rear thy splendid fane to God. 

O rich in fruits and grains and oils and ores, 

And all things that the feastful earth outpours, 
Yet lacking leech-craft for thy leprous sores! 

Heal thee betimes, and cleanse thee, lest in ire 

He whom thou mock’st with pomp of arch and spire 
Come on thee sleeping, with a scythe of fire. 

Let nave and transept rest awhile; but when 

Thou hast done His work who lived and died for men, 
Then build His temple on high,—not, not, till then. 


William Watson has hardly attained the promise of 
his early work. At times his mind has been somewhat 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 217 


disturbed, which may partly account for it. He has 
often struck a brave, true note, lent his voice to the 
song that is building the world. And for this we are 
grateful. But how can the poet reach the best and 
highest without the joy of a splendid vision! To Wat- 
son the light is often only twilight gray, and the way 
is uncertain. 


I wandered far in the wold, 

And after the heat and glare 

I came at eve to a Churchyard old: 
The yew trees seemed at prayer. 


And around me was dust in dust, 
And the fleeting light, and Repose— 
And the infinite pathos of human trust 
In a God whom no man knows. 
(“The Church in the Wold’) 


II 


In Stephen Phillips we have a poet of surer note, if 
not so great a gift as Watson. On the appearance of 
his first volume, he was hailed as a poet of great prom- 
ise, and that year 1897, it was crowned by the London 
Academy. He was a very young man then. He 
showed an original and musical gift, but his chief in- 
terest was in human life, not hesitating to question its 
deeper and more tragic phases, and tracing, to use a 
phrase of John Fiske, the law of love and sacrifice 
down into the lowest roots and crannies of the world. 

No book of lyrics has appeared since the first thin 
volume. The last years of his life were devoted to the 
drama. “The Sin of David,” “Francesca and Paolo,” 


~ 


218 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


“Nero,” “Faust,” “Herod,” indicate the tragic themes 
he has dealt with, the development of character under 
temptation, the awakening of the soul, its pain and 
growth, its defeat and triumph under sin. It is a real 
world he treats, the mystery of sin, the forces that live 
in our lives and help to shape our course that we cannot 
measure and so dimly understand. Yet there is no de- 
ceitful glamour over sin, no seductive music to charm 
and lull the soul. The destiny of man is in his own 
hands. 

Mr. Phillips is never lawless in the treatment of the 
primal passions, but he is not timid and conventional. 
He has something of the sturdy courage and optimism 
of Browning: 


God never is dishonored in the spark 

He gave us from the fire of fires, and bade 

Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid 

While that burns on, though all the rest grow dark. 
(“Any Wife to Any Husband”) 


I remember that some of his early poems were se- 
verely criticized by a writer in the Atheneum, as deal- 
ing with subjects too coarse, subjects that were beneath 
poetry. “The Woman with the Dead Soul” was one 
of them. What interest could we have, asked the writer, 
in a poor serving woman whose soul burned and flick- 
ered and went out through drudgery and the street! 
And there was the wife who sold her body to buy bread 
for her husband sick and starving through out of work. 
What nobleness and ideality could there be in such 
vulgar scenes? It was not poetry for cultivated souls; 
it was the verse of the slum! But this, I think, is not 
condemnation but high praise. It is the nobility of 
Stephen Phillips that he is not exclusive, the pet of the 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 219 


club or the drawing-room, but the brother of the poor, 
the friend of the unfortunate, that he can feel with the 
lowly and interpret the heart that struggles and suffers 
amid shame and defeat. It is a true realism, a life 
which only the poet can see in its tragic import, and 
present so that it shall be cleansing of social pride and 
cruelty and work for a day when society shall not be 
built on the sorrows and sins of the poor. 

There is the beauty and power of true pathos in the 
picture of the wife who had vainly made the sacrificial 
offering of herself for bread. 


She felt how cold is God, how brief our breath, 
How vain is any love, how strong is death; 
O fool, O fool! to have so quickly died; 

I am unclean forevermore, she cried; 

And then with fear, with gathering distrust, 
Swiftly between his teeth the morsels thrust. 
Then stiller grew; and with a moaning slow 
Relented now, and wearied in her woe. 

But as the woman, dying in her thought, 
Looked upward; at her dress her baby caught, 
And she revived, and toward her little son 
Ventured, that he into her arms might run. 
And like a strange woman all doubtfully 

She stretched her arms out, shining wistfully, 
As though with meek advances she beguiled 
Into her sighing bosom her own child. 

Then pulled him close to her, and held him there, 
And those tears fell down into his hair. 
Softly she said: “O cruel new-born thing! 
The years to you a gentleness will bring: 
Then think of me as one that not in thought, 
But out of yearning into woe was brought.” 
So as she mourned above him, the old farm 
With evening noises in the twilight charm 


220 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Returned, and she remembered quiet trees 

Just stirring; she can hear the very breeze! 
Her prudent mother wisely to her speaks, 

Her peaceful hair a little sorrow streaks. 

And as a soft and dreadful summer day 

Will suddenly through chill December stray, 
So the mild beauty of old happiness 

Wandered into her mind with strange distress; 
Till slowly with the gathering light, lo life 
Came back to her; desire and dust and strife; 
The huge and various world with murmur grand. 


Through the strong and tender humanity of Stephen 
Phillips runs a faith in a better world than this and in 
a Divine power that wills and is working for it. 
“Lazarus,” with perhaps a memory of Browning’s “Let- 
ter of Ben Karshish,’ expresses the reverent love for 
the Friend of Man, the Lord of Life. 


O face that seemest made to weep and smile 

With us, and hands all rough with common tasks! 
Is this, indeed, thy sun to which Thou hast 
Recalled me, and are these Thy fields, which grow 
Slowly from gray to green before my eyes? 

I felt Thee irresistible in the grave. 

Forgive me that I talked so lightly, and went 

So unconcerned beside Thee in old days. 

How is it Thou canst care to come and go 

With such as me, and walk and work with us, 
Thou at whose whisper Death idled and grieved, 
And knew the voice at which creation shone 
Suddenly? Yet was I so near to peace: 

And I came back to life remorsefully, 

When the sea murmured again, and fields appeared. 
But how should I complain? Unto what end 

I am recalled I know not; but if Thou 

Art here content to be, then why not I? 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 221 


And there is the true expression of faith, pressed 
out of his human love and need, in his EEE towards 
personal loss and sorrow. 


Thou power, that beyond the wind 
Rulest, to Thee I am resigned. 

My child from me is snatched away: 
She vanished at the peer of day. 

Yet I discern with clearer brow 

A high indulgence in the blow, 

Light in the storm that o’er me broke, 
A special kindness in the stroke, 

A gentleness behind the law, 

A sweetness following on the awe. 
Shall I forget that noon-day hour, 
When as upon some favorite flower 

A deep and tingling bliss was shed, 

A thrilling peace from overhead? 

I had not known it since my birth, 

I shall not know it more on earth. 

But now I may not sin, nor err, 

For fear of ever losing her. 

Though reeling from Thy thunder-blow, 
Though blinded with Thy lightning low, 
I stagger back to dismal life, 

And mix myself with mortal strife, 
Thy judgment still to me is sweet; 

I feel, I feel, that we must meet. 


Surely I am right in calling Stephen Phillips a poet | 
of the growing light, reverent towards God and sensi- 
tive to all human need. 


III 


Two other poets have something in common, in their 
simple and vivid realities and broad sympathies and 


222 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


their bold originality. I refer to Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 
and John Masefield. 

You may not think that Mr. Gibson stands for grow- 
ing light. I do not know that he has a positive reli- 
gious tone. It may seem like turning back after Stephen 
Phillips. But I think he contributes to faith, faith in 
man at least. Like a true artist, he can touch a scene 
of human passions with ideal light and yet not take 
away any of its reality. He can deal with the most 
hopeless scenes of human life yet lose no heart. There 
is no bitterness in him, no cynical pessimism. His 
wholesome nature interprets for him the essential worth 
of life. 

Mr. Gibson has the art of interpreting life and nat- 
ural scenery in the most delicate yet vivid way. “The 
Gorse” can hardly be surpassed for the combined real- 
ism of man and nature, the fear of a hunted man “stung 
to headlong flight.” 


He blundered towards the league-wide yellow blaze, 
“Bewildered in a glittering golden maze 
Of stinging scented fire.” 


And he interprets loss in the same subtle art; some 
simple fact of nature giving voice to the soul’s bereave- 
ment. 


We who are left, how shall we look again 
Happily on the sun or feel the rain 

Without remembering how they who went 
Ungrudgingly and spent 

Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain? 
A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings— 

But we, how shall we turn to little things 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 222 


And listen to the birds and winds and streams 

Made holy by their dreams, 

Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things. 
(“Lament”) 


But I think Mr. Gibson’s most significant work is 
found in “Daily Bread.” The book is made up of 
sketches of the English poor in the form of single act 
plays. The characters in each are few, and they stand 
out with the distinctness of real life. Some moment is 
chosen when the light falls upon the bareness of their 
lot, the frame-wasting drudgery, the risk of toil, the 
slow starvation, the sturdy hands stretched out in vain 
for work, the pathos of broken hopes. Yet through it 
all is the essential worth of life, the heroism of simple 
duty, the life that time nor choice can weaken nor 
destroy. 

The first-born is taken, and the mother says: 


My bosom yearns for him. 
Your heart will evermore be empty. 


And the husband replies: 


Nay, wife, nay! 

Shall not your breast and mine 
Be ever full of love for him? 
Sweet memories of him 

Shall nestle in our hearts, 
Forevermore. 

And we have still each other. 


And the mother adds, 


And our son! 


224 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


An old woman whose youngest and last son has been 
taken by the toil of the sea, exclaims: 


I have not found much happiness in life; 
And now all that I’ve toiled for, 
The happiness I thought within my reach, 
That I have labored after all these years, 
Is snatched from me; 
And in the end, 
I find no balm of peace. 
And still have I not toiled? 
And toil is something more than happiness; 
’Tis life itself. 
I have not flinched from life 
But looked it in the face. 

(“The Betrothed”) 


Mr. Gibson well says of such scenes: 


All life moving to one measure— 

Daily bread, daily bread— 

Bread of life, and bread of labor, 

Bread of bitterness and sorrow, 
Hand-to-mouth, and no to-morrow, 

Death for house mate, death for neighbor— 
Yet when all the babes are fed, 

Love, are there not crumbs to treasure? 


Mr. Gibson has written much since the first volume. 
Poems have been collected under the title, “Border- 
lands and Thoroughfares,” and his poems are frequently 
found in our best monthlies. He has large interests, 
sees the significant elements in a scene or experience, 
has vivid description of nature and vital interpretation 
of life. But the first book “Daily Bread” is character- 
istic and prophetic of the man. Behind rough faces 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 225 


and in hard conditions, he sees the essential worth of 
man. His verse is always charged with human interest 
and feeling. 


IV 


John Masefield is proof that poetry is the gift of the 
gods and not of the schools. The schools have had 
nothing to do with it. “The poet is born, not made.” 
Tennyson could not attain his greatness without the 
schools, that fine culture of the university, that study 
of the great thinkers of the world, that intercourse with 
refined and noble minds, the mastery of the materials 
and laws of his art. He could not have been Tennyson 
without all this. It made him a Master, and all others 
of the time are indebted to him. 

But Masefield without any adventitious aids, without 
the help of institutions and literatures and men seems 
destined to a place in English literature hardly second 
to Tennyson. He is only in middle life. And almost 
every year, notable work comes from him, flows like 
the waters of a great spring in the mountains down into 
the valleys. 

He is the product of the race and not of any special 
environment or culture, like Shakspere or Burns, like 
Bunyan or Spurgeon, like John Bright or John Burns. 
He not only rises from the common stock like some 
wild flower or fruit from the earth; but his experience 
has been so strange and varied that nature and life speak 
with wonderful realism in his verse, and he has some- 
thing of a universal note. 

Masefield has been a sailor before the mast and in 
many seas; he has followed the herds over the vast and 
unconquered pampas of Argentine, that land so incon- 


226 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE . 


ceivable to us, and yet made real by Hudson, the Eng- 
lish naturalist; he has stood behind the bar in a New 
York saloon, a student of the underworld; he took 
many a handy turn in the great war; and everywhere, 
scene, event, person made their impress on the sensitive 
plate of his genius. 

He is our chief narrator. He writes as good prose 
as verse. You will find no better yarns of the fo’castle 
than a “Tarpaulin Muster.” Yet his gift is in narra- 
tive poetry. The herder’s life, the vast and monotonous 
pastures of the Argentine, and life common and ro- 
mantic and tragic are all in “The Daffodil Fields.” 
There couldn’t be a greater contrast than ‘Reynard the 
Fox” and “Right Royal,” the recent books depicting an 
English hunt and a steeple chase. The ceaseless motion, 
the intense, excited strivings, the terrible hazards, the 
final excitement, it does not seem possible that poetry 
could narrate it all, and yet be poetry; the ever new 
symbolism, the accuracy of scene, the human spirit and 
the animal venture, the horse and rider in oneness of 
striving,—such sustained narrative has not been equalled 
since Sir Walter Scott. I quote from a criticism in a 
recent Yale Review: ‘“Masefield has made himself be- 
yond any living poet the voice of great English tradi- 
tions speaking in the modern world. In him survives 
the devout chivalry of Chaucer’s ‘Book of the Duchess,’ 
Spenser’s Platonic enthusiasm for ideal beauty, the 
valiancy of Elizabethan adventurers and Shakspere’s 
heroes, a passionate tenderness for the ancient country- 
side, and an almost unspeakable love for tall ships and 
the sea. His ‘Reynard the Fox’ and this glorification 
of the steeple chase ‘Right Royal’ are great poems of 
English sport; one can hardly imagine a time when 
Englishmen will not love them, or when they will not 


OF “MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 227 


be the classical treatment of steeple-chasing and fox- 
hunting. But they are much more than sporting poems. 
Masefield with his deeply traditional genius has sat- 
urated his themes with historical feeling, and made 
them true episodes in the epic of the English race.” 
(April, 1921.) 

But I do not forget the purpose of this study. Has 
Masefield a spiritual message? He began as a writer 
of plays, but best expresses himself in narrative lyrics. 

The “Everlasting Mercy” is called “the most daring, 
realistic, and beautiful poetry that has been written for 
a great while,” and it received the prize of the London 
Academy for the best literary work of the year. It is 
certainly daring and realistic. It is a bold man who 
would find poetry in a prize fight, an unchaste bar- 
maid and a brute crazed by drink. It is so realistic 
that you cannot read parts of it aloud, and you almost 
blush to read it in the privacy of your own room. It’s 
like going with a police detective to see the underworld. 
And you do see it, and you can hardly draw breath in 
that foul air. The poem has atmosphere. There is no 
doubt of that. Hogarth’s drawings are not more real- 
istic. 

Your first thought is a question whether such scenes 
can be poetry. You call to mind Stopford Brooke’s 
criticism of the spasmodic school, the group of “hot- 
tempered, passionate, egotistic’’ young poets. (Oscar 
Wilde and that set.) “The senses, the appetites are 
part of human nature. They also are to be presented 
in poetry; but then, if art represents their base ex- 
~ tremes, such art has ceased to be art, and has passed 
into the science of morbid conditions.” But you soon 
feel that the wonderful realism of rufflanism and de- 
bauchery are that we may measure the true recovery 


228 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


of the soul, and understand in part the redeeming power 
of the “Everlasting Mercy.” It is Harold Begbie with 
a poet’s soul. How can we know the miracle of the 
lily without the black earth from which it grew! 


O lovely lily clean, 

O lily springing green, 

O lily bursting white, 
Dear lily of delight, 
Spring in my heart again 
That I may flower to men. 


The poem also has a social message. It is an exact 
picture of the brutality and lewdness that center in the 
public house of many an English village. And the 
frenzied man’s accusation of the parson and the squire 
has enough truth in it to waken consciences that slum- 
ber under a traditional system. 

And it has scenes of simple and exquisite beauty. 
And the redeemed drunkard’s delight in nature is only 
what John Bunyan felt when he called upon the birds 
to join with him in the new song. 


So up the road I wander slow 
Past where the snow-drops used to grow 
With celandines in early springs, 

When rainbows were triumphant things 
And dew so bright and flowers so glad, 
Eternal joy to lass and lad. 

And past the lovely brook I paced, 

The brook whose source I never traced, 
The brook, the one of two which rise 

In my green dream of Paradise, 

In wells where heavenly buckets clink 
To give God’s wandering thirsty drink 
By those clean cots of carven stone 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 229 


Where the clear water sings alone. 
Then down, past that white-blossomed pond, 
And past the chestnut trees beyond, 
And past the bridge the fishers knew, 
Where yellow flag flowers once grew, 
Where we'd go gathering cops of clover, 
In Sunny June times long since over. 

O clover-cops half white, half red, 

O beauty from beyond the dead. 

O blossom, key to earth and heaven, 

O souls that Christ has new forgiven. 


The late President Hyde of Bowdoin College calls 
Masefield our most effective modern preacher of the 
exceeding sinfulness of sin, its meanness and wanton- 
ness and cruelty. And he takes “The Widow in the 
Bye Street’ as the text for the meanness of sin. As 
Dickens shows Steerforth the Seducer in the light of 
the grief of the Peggoty household, so John Masefield 
shows sexual sin against the background of the misled 
boy’s broken-hearted mother. And that’s where you 
must see it to know how cruel and contemptible it is. 
It is sin against motherhood. It always breaks some 
mother’s heart. 

And there are few passages of modern poetry so 
profoundly religious as the prayer of the mother at the 
execution of her misguided son. 


“And God who gave His mercies takes His mercies, 
And God who gives beginning gives the end. 
I dread my death; but it’s the end of curses, 
A rest for broken things too broke to mend. 
O Captain Christ, our blessed Lord and Friend, 
We are two wandered sinners in the mire, 
Burn our dead hearts with love out of Thy fire. 


230 


Mr. Masefield has seen much of life. 
the wanderlust of many a young Englishman. 
of his vagabondage he has come purified of many fool- 
ish notions, with calmness of vision and with profound 
understanding and pity for men in their conflicting 
desires. He has finely given his own philosophy of life, 


THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


And when thy death comes, Master, let us bear it 
As of Thy will, however hard to go; 

Thy Cross is infinite for us to share it, 

Thy help is infinite for us to know. 

And when the long trumpets of the Judgment blow 
May our poor souls be glad and meet agen, 

And rest in Thee.” “Say, ‘Amen,’ Jim.” “Amen.” 


drawn from his checkered experiences. 


The many-pictured world of many passions 
Wears out the nations as a woman’s fashions, 
And what life is is much to very few; 

Men being so strange, so mad, and what men do 
So good to match or share; but when men count 
Those hours of life that were a bursting fount, 
Sparkling the dusty heart with living springs, 
There seems a world, beyond our earthly things, 
Gated by golden moments, each bright time 
Opening to show the city white like lime, 
High-towered and many-peopled. This made sure, 
Work that obscures those moments seems impure, 
Making our not-returning time of breath 

Dull with the ritual and records of death, 

That frost of fact by which our wisdom gives 
Correctly stated death to all that lives. 


Best trust the happy moments. What they give 
Makes man less fearful of the certain grave, 
And gives his work compassion and new eyes. 
The days that make us happy make us wise. 


He has had 
But out 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 231 


I have called the group of men we have considered 
in this chapter, Poets of the Dawn. It may seem an 
uncertain light to some of you. The morning is gray 
with clouds, and storms still sweep the sky. But the 
morning has dawned. A new day has come. 


ee oy Nea 
a ae ) ms 





CHAPTER XI 
Poets of the New Day 





CHAPTER XI 
POETS OF THE NEW DAY 


There is a deep impression voiced in many ways, 
that we are at the beginning of another creative era in 
poetry. The opening of the nineteenth century was 
such an era, only matched once before in the history 
of our language, “the spacious times of great Elizabeth.” 
The forces then, scientific, democratic, religious, stirred 
the national life, and found their finest expression and 
their most pervasive influence in a group of great poets. 

Similar forces are troubling the depths of our life 
to-day. The scientific spirit has passed from its critical 
phase into constructive ideals that have quickened and 
enlarged every realm of thought and endeavor. The 
democratic movement has broadened and deepened with 
the century until it is not the struggle for political rights 
against the power of a few, but the effort to give the 
downmost man a soul, to open to all a human way of 
life. And it is world-wide. The world war made the 
democratic movement evident and dominant; in the 
sententious language of the Chicago Tribune, “It is the 
twilight of the Kings. Western Democracy of the peo- 
ple marches eastward.” And in spite of terrible reac- 
tions, the cynical pessimism that followed the heights 
of sacrifice, in every nation are groups of idealists who 
have vowed to make war accursed, and at whatever cost 
to be true to their visions of a just and humane world. 

And religion as never before is the question of uni- 


235 


236 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


versal life; its questions not battled for so much in the 
upper air as on the earth where men sin and suffer, 
struggle and hope. The scientific spirit and the demo- 
cratic movement have both helped to the conception of 
God in his world of nature and human life, have hu- 
manized religion, and carried it into every sphere and 
province of man’s life. 

The poets feel and index this new life. Their strings 
vibrate with the faintest breath of the Spirit. The poets 
tell of Spring before the buds swell or the first robins 
come. One robin doesn’t make a summer, but when a 
small flock of robins is hopping over our lawns, and 
singing in our trees, we know that May “with one great 
gust of blossom” will soon storm our world. 

The poets have come. They have felt the breath of 
the new life and they are singing its message. We may 
call them minor poets; we do not know what some of 
them may become. It would be easy to count two score 
in England who give the accent of the deeper life. 
There may be as many in our own land, though they 
are hardly heard in the din of our machinery or the 
bustling importance of our politics. 

One of our weekly reviews recently referred to the 
significant fact that two magazines of poetry have been 
started in America: Poetry in Chicago and the Poetry 
Journal in Boston. And the latter quotes from Profes- 
sor Woodberry of Columbia to show the relation be- 
tween poetry and the national life: “The notion that 
poetry is a thing remote from life is a singular delusion ; 
it is more truly to be described as the highway of our 
days, though we tread it, as children tread the path of 
innocence, without knowing it. Nothing is more con- 
stant in the life of boy or man than the outgoing of his 
soul into the world about him, and this outgoing, how- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 237 


ever it be achieved, is the act of poetry.” And Mr. 
Hamilton Mabie says of the new English poetry, “It 
is well worth studying . . . because it shows that the 
soul of the country is awake. It is clean poetry; it 
has not fallen into the slough of eroticism which dulls 
the senses, blurs the vision, and blights the imagination. 
One feels in it the passion for humanity which heralds 
a rebirth of freedom in the modern world. Much of 
it is crude, but so are all beginnings. It must not be 
overpraised, but it ought to be recognized. The people 
who do not know their poets have ceased to hear the 
voices of their own souls.” 

I think the most significant fact of the new poetry is 
its changed attitude towards religion. The great poets 
of every age are religious. They view life as a whole 
and that whole is incomprehensible without God. But 
lesser minds do not rise above the mists that settle 
down upon an age. After Tennyson and Browning 
was a school of true poets but men of feebler light and 
feeling, to whom Christian truth was a superstition or 
a perhaps. Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Meredith were 
not irreligious, but critical towards the creeds and insti- 
tutions of the Christian Church, regarding them as 
simply the development of the religious spirit of man, 
often unrational, or as the institutions of an old order, 
hostile to the highest rational and social growth. And 
there were not a few that made poetry a sensuous and 
esthetic delight, or the fierce cry of a baffled and de- 
spairing spirit. 

But there is little of the discordant and defiant note 
of a storm and stress period in the younger poets. If 
there are problems that baffle the understanding, there 
is brave work to do and light enough to catch some- 
thing of its meaning and the divine event to which all 


238 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


is moving. If religious faith is not always pronounced, 
the heart still questioning, it is the quest of hope, and 
prophetic of the day when the mountain peaks shall be 
bathed in the light, though the shadows linger in the 
lower vales. 

Our modern life has been stirred to its deepest depths 
by the shock of forces long gathering. Where no nation 
has clean hands, it is folly to attempt to fix the final 
guilt for the contest that has brought our civilization 
to the brink of ruin. But through the confused alarms 
of war, one truth is clear to the Christian seer: the war 
is only a colossal phase of the eternal contest between 
old systems and the living Word. 

Under such trying experiences the elemental nature 
of man is laid bare. The breaking of old habits and 
precious ties, the uncertainties and perils of the days, 
the appeal of a cause which men associate with patriot- 
ism and the will of God, the terrible discipline of suf- 
fering, awaken the nobler powers of life and assert our 
kinship with God. 


There is no God, the foolish saith, 
But none, there is no sorrow. 

* * * * * 
And eyes the preacher could not school 
By wayside graves are raised, 

And lips cry “God be pitiful,” 
That ne’er said “God be praised.” 


The first call to sacrifice awakened latent manhood 
and found expression in strong religious feeling. The 
first months of the war the Cologne Gazette wrote, “The 
vulgar and impure are no more seen in our shop win- 
dows, nor the suggestive heard in our theaters. The 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 239 


German people are thinking high thoughts.” Le Matin 
of Paris said, “The Churches are once more filled, and 
a new honor is given to the priesthood.” M. Barrés, 
editing the journals of young French officers, finds an 
elevated religious spirit. “They shall live,’ he exclaims, 
“but if they should perish, France shall be built anew 
with their lives, as with living stones.” And the West- 
minster Gazette said, “Never since Cromwell have so 
many soldiers marched under the sense of Divine direc- 
tion.” 

I know we have been wisely cautioned against plac- 
ing undue hope on the emotional fervors awakened by 
sacrifice. War is brutal, destructive, wasteful, not only 
of life and treasure, but of the very fruits of the Spirit. 
“Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” 
Disillusion comes from the long, grey, wasting years. 
“The real loss of war,” says an English critic, “is loss 
of faith in justice, in humanity, in the soul itself.” 

But I am sure there is a deeper meaning than this. 
Even a momentary response is a revelation of the soul’s 
capacity. 

What we long for, that we are 
For one transcendent moment. 


The finest souls of the world have always been purified 
by fire; and there’s many a touch of the unseen upon 
the common mind. Millions have been fairly driven 
to God: it has been God or dumb despair or brute in- 
difference. Many have won their faith as Job did 
through deepest experience of pain and loss: “I know 
that my vindicator liveth.” 

And this deep experience has created poetry and 
found its noblest expression in poetry. Only poetry 
could voice some of its moods or catch some of its 


240 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


visions. In such a world-disturbance, every life is 
touched. All the well-known poets have something to 
say, and unexpected voices are heard. 


Heaven flowed upon the soul in many dreams 
Of high desire. 


There were no mute, inglorious Miltons. Never be- 
fore did such a multitude find poetry the natural and 
necessary mode of expression. 

In this new poetry of war there is a deena FAB 
absence of the purely martial ring. It is true there are 
no more thrilling war lyrics in our language. Lord 
Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,’ or Sir 
Henry Newbolt’s “Lampida Vite” can not more stir 
the blood than Campbell’s ““Langemarke at Ypres” or 
Conan Doyle’s ‘The Guards Came Through,” or Her- 
bert Kaufman’s “The Hell Gate of Soissons.’”’ But in 
this poetry there is no glory in war itself, no cruel lust 
of conquest. We are reminded of the word of the 
noble French captain, “There is no glory in war; the 
glory is in the soul of man.” The silent sense, some- 
times breaking into passionate expression, of the moral 
justification of so dreadful a thing as war, the revolt 
of the Christian conscience, the abhorrence and protest 
of all that makes the taste and excellence of life against 
the necessity of war, give the high resolve and moral 
enthusiasm, the dread force to men essentially lovers 
of peace. 

When James Elroy Tucker strikes the note of Eng- 
lish pride and patriotism in ‘“The Dying Patriot”— 


Sleep not, my country, though night is here, afar 
Your children of the morning are clamorous for war; 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 241 


and besides appeals to the love of the sea, and the sea- 
girt land: | 


When they come forth to seek this empire o’er thee, 
And I go forth to meet them, on that day 
God grant to us the old Armada weather, 
The winds that rip, the heavens that stoop and lour— 


the poet thinks less of the glory of the smashing blow 
than on the sacrificial consecration of the spirit. 

It is the cleansing might of sacrifice that has awak- 
ened the noblest song as it has the most heroic char- 
acter. The English language has rarely pulsed with 
stronger thought and feeling than in ‘“Subalterns, a 
Song of Oxford,” by Miss Mildred Huxley, first pub- 
lished in the Spectator. 


They had so much to lose; their radiant laughter 
Shook my old walls—how short a time ago, 

I hold the echoes of their song hereafter 
Among the precious things I used to know. 


Their cup of life was full to overflowing, 

All earth had laid its tribute at their feet. 

What harvest might we hope from such a sowing? 
What noonday from a dawning so complete? 


And I—I watched them working, dreaming, playing, 
Saw their young bodies fit the mind’s desire, 

Felt them reach outward, upward, still obeying 
The passionate dictates of their hidden fire. 


Yet here and there some grey-beard breathed derision, 
‘Too much of luxury, too soft an age! 

Your careless Galahads will see no vision, 

Your knights will make no mark on honor’s page.’ 


242 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


No mark? Go ask the broken fields in Flanders, 
Ask the great dead who watch, in ancient Troy, 
Ask the old moon as round the world she wanders, 
What of the men who were my hope and joy! 


They are but fragments of Imperial splendor, 
Handfuls of might amidst a mighty host, 

Yet I, who saw them go with proud surrender, 
May surely claim to love them first and most. 


They who had all, gave all. Their half-writ story 
Lies in the empty halls they knew so well, 
But they, the knights of God, shall see His glory, 
And find the Grail ev’n in the fire of hell. 


And this brings us to the starred name—suggesting 
the incalculable loss of war,—the gifted young poet, 
the modern Byron but a nobler Byron, once known as 
a careless Bohemian, a clever verse-maker, who be- 
came in the white light of patriotism and valor, “a 
poet whom it is not absurd to call great.” Let Rupert 


Brooke himself tell the secret of his spiritual awaken- 
ing: | 


Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us for our dearth 
Holiness lacked so long, and love and pain. 

Honor has come back as a king to earth, 

And paid his subjects with a royal wage: 

And nobleness walks in our ways again; 

And we have come into our heritage. 


We should hardly call war a school of piety. The 
many are made_ reckless and brutal by it. A chosen 
few come through the great ordeal better men. The 
discipline, the imminence of death, the demand for 
sympathy and sacrifice, the banner of a noble cause 
awaken true self-hood, a new reverence, and idealism 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 243 


and devotion. Religion is born of it, a turning to God, 
when every human helper fails. It is voiced again and 
again, notably in Alfred Noyes’ “A Prayer in War 
Time.” Christ and his cross is felt anew, if not wholly 
understood, as the eternal truth of God, and at the 
heart of human mystery. “Christ in Flanders,’ from 
an almost unknown singer, in simple, appealing lines 
speaks of the sin and sorrow, the struggle and pain 
of man as in the heart of the Eternal Father. This 
vicarious law of life is expressed in “The Three Hills” 
of Everard Owen, written from Eton: 


There is a hill in England, 
Green fields and a school I know, 
Where the balls fly fast in summer, 
And the whispering elm-trees grow; 
A little hill, a dear hill, 
And the playing fields below. 


There is a hill in Flanders, 
Heaped with a thousand slain, 
Where the shells fly night and noon-tide 
And the ghosts that died in vain,— 
A little hill, a hard hill 
To the souls that died in pain. 


There is a hill in Jewry, 
Three crosses pierce the sky, 
On the midmost He is dying 
To save all those who die,— 
A little hill, a kind hill 
To souls in jeopardy. 


The reality of the living Christ is felt anew in such 
lines as Prys-Jones’ “The Everlasting Arms,” or in 
“The Faithful Comrade,” by P. J. Fisher. 


244 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Where stark and shattered walls 
Mourn desolate to the sky 

He buildeth me a home, 

And well doth fortify. 


The sweeping scythes play near 
And shrill about my head; 

I look into His eyes 

That smile away my dread. 


And when with faltering feet 
I thread the perilous trench, 
Hs print the clay before 

And shame me if I blench. 


If nerve and spirit yield 
Before the grim demands, 
New power is in the touch 
Of His transfigured hands. 


The thousand barbarous tongues 
Of war may round me brawl; 
His love within my heart 

Sings louder than them all. 


O edgeless armament! 

O empty jeopardy! 

While He, my Comrade, walks 
The stricken fields with me. 


And the thought of the Immortal Lite has a new and 
joyous significance, not through spirits that peep and 
mutter, or the sentimental craving that seeks the living 
among the dead, but in the multitude of young knights 
who have gone West, to the adventure and service of 
a new world: 


Paradise now is the soldier’s land, 
Their own country its shining sod, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 24 


Common all in a merry band; 
And the young knights’ laughter pleaseth God. 
(Katharine Tynan, “New Heaven”) 


The poets tell us that on the soul of man is the 
handwriting of God, and like an old palimpsest, how- 
ever obscured by the marks of a selfish and faithless 
life, the divine message stands clear again through the 
sharp chemicals of suffering. 

The poetry of the war is more than an incident in the 
awakening of imagination and feeling that promised a 
new day for English song. Such poetry would not 
have been possible without the men who stood in the 
succession of Chaucer and Milton, Wordsworth and 
Browning. It is a group of poets that justifies my 
theme, of whom I would especially speak. There may 
be forty of them, a noble group, most of their names 
found in the volumes of Georgian Poetry, collections 
made in recent years from books and from papers and 
reviews like the Spectator, the Atheneum and the 
Nation. 

It is new poetry and yet it is marked by its reverence 
for the great standards of the masters. They have 
learned the freshness and vividness of the best free 
verse. They have learned the “crisp, incisive and terse” 
diction that deals with immediate and external impres- 
sion. They know the artistic possibilities of new sys- 
tems, the beauty of many an image that lends distinc- 
tion to the new school; but they also know that poetry 
must do something more than be busied with its own 
craftsmanship, than enjoy its own sensations however 
exquisite, that there are still “exaltations, agonies, and 
love and man’s unconquerable mind,” and with these 
the poet must wrestle if he would be the guide and 


246 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


interpreter of life. The best of the new poets are not 
iconoclasts, cutting themselves off from the past and 
despising its work, but the children of the prophets, 
rejoicing in their heritage and trying to carry on and 
add to the great traditions of English song. Yet these | 
new poets are poets of freedom. They are independent 
and original, never the slaves of convention; pioneers 
of progress, bold enough to venture beyond the old 
landmarks. Gordon Bottomley’s Lear gives no hint 
of Shakspere’s great creation, yet it has its own dra- 
matic power. It is a cruder, more barbaric Lear than 
Shakspere’s, and I am sure it is nearer to the times 
and manners of the early Celtic Kings. It lays bare 
the elemental passions with coarse but telling realism. 

And James Stephen’s “Lonely God”’ tells the story 
of the Lost Paradise differently from the Genesis nar- 
rative or Milton’s great epic, but with a humanness that 
appeals to our modern thought. It harmonizes with our 
best thought of religion that Paradise would be a lonely 
place without the children, and surely it is in harmony 
with Christ’s thought of God, the Master who sends 
his servants into the highways and byways, who would 
have all come to his feast, that his house might be full. 

There is more than one modern poet that suggests 
the thinker. You can not get his whole message by a 
single careless reading. They are far more than a single 
lyric cry, an impressionist’s picture of a single scene 
of nature or a single phase of life. Once more they 
have taken their calling seriously, to interpret life, to 
help men to live, to furnish noble grounds for noble 
emotions, to show the age to itself and be heralds of a 
better day. Both Abercrombie and Bottomley take the 
“End of the World” as a poetic theme, the first de- 
scribing the effect of a blazing comet upon a coarse, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 247 


ignorant crowd of an English public house: the super- 
stitious fear, the panic, the hasty repentance, the old 
life resumed when the fear is gone; while Bottomley 
pictures a single family dying of cold, the final extinc- 
tion of life without the sun. The latter, in “Babel, the 
Gate of God,” interprets the building genius of man, 
in ancient temples and towers and pyramids, as the 
craving of the race after God. 


Space, the old source of time, should be undone, 
Eternity defined, by men who trusted 
Another tier would equal them with God. 


Such examples show the tendency of the best mod- 
ern English poetry to deal with significant themes, to 
deal with great materials, and not carve statues out of 
cherry stones. 

There is a certain prophetic sense in this poetry; it 
appeals to the nobler elements of men and interprets 
the motives and forces that would make for spiritual 
progress. Not that its themes are religious in the tech- 
nical sense,—there are many fine examples of this ;— 
but as nature herself is a missionary, the very stones 
of the field in league with righteousness, as man and 
human affairs tell of a moral order and purpose, so 
these poems in dealing with the greater themes of life, 
in picturing the real motives and conflicts of the human 
heart, speak for God and make for the higher life of 
the race. 

Perhaps nothing is more significant of this serious 
element than the “Sale of St. Thomas” by Lascelles 
Abercrombie. The poet deals with the legend of St. 
Thomas and India. The Apostle stands on the dock 
about to sail for the distant land. But he thinks of the 
dangers of the sea. 


248 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


How fearful is this trade of sailing! Worse 
Than all land-evils is the water-way 
Before me now.—What, cowardice? Nay, why 
Trouble myself with ugly words? ’Tis prudence, 
And prudence is an admirable thing. 

* * * * * 


I, who have seen God, I put myself 
Amid the heathen outrage of the sea 
In a deal-wood box! It were plain folly. 


Then Thomas thinks of the climate of India, and its 
breeds of insect and reptile life, and more than all the 
strange and cruel superstitions of its people, and he 
shrinks from the venture. 


If Christ desired India, He had sent 

The band of us, solder’d in one great purpose, 

To strike His message through those dark, vast tribes. 
But one man!—O surely it is folly 

And we misread the lot! One man, to thrust, 

Even though in his soul the lamp was kindled 

At God’s own hands, one man’s lit soul to thrust 
The immense Indian darkness out of the world! 


Then a noble stranger approaches the quay, the Master 
in disguise, and says to the captain that this man is his 
runaway slave; sells him to the captain, and gives these 
parting words to his servant. 


Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear; 
Easily may a man crouch down for fear, 

And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face 

The hailing storm of the world with graver courage. 
But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin, 

And one that groweth deep into a life, 

With hardening roots that clutch about the breast, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 249 


For this refuses faith in the unknown powers 
Within man’s nature, shrewdly bringeth all 
Their inspiration of strange eagerness 

To a judgment bought by safe experience; 
Narrows desire into the scope of thought. 
But it is written in the heart of man, 

Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire. 
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit’s sight 
To pore only within the candle-gleam 

Of conscious wit and reasonable brain; 

But search into the sacred darkness lying 
Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast 
Measureless fate, full of the power of stars, 
The outer, noiseless heavens of thy soul. 
Keep thy desire closed in the room of light 
The laboring fires of thy mind have made, 
And thou shalt find the vision of thy spirit 
Pitifully dazzled to so shrunk a ken, 

There are no spacious puissances about it. 
But send desire often forth to scan 

The immense night which is thy greater soul; 
Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it 
Into impossible things, unlikely ends; 

And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire 
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul, 
Whose firmaments doth cover the whole of Being, 
And of created purpose reach the ends. 


“The Fires of God,’ by John Drinkwater (best 


known to us by his drama of Lincoln), is perhaps the 
finest example of the spirit of modern poetry, in trying 
to lead life, to pluck out the heart of the mystery. 


A man looks at his life and confesses that he has not 


really lived. 


Along the ways wheredown my feet have fassea 
I see the years with little triumph crowned, * * * 


250 


THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Poor barren years that brooded overmuch 
On your own burden. 


He resolves that henceforth he will live: he will try to 
know life and fill out its full measure. 


Henceforth my hands are lifted to the touch 
Of hands that labor with me, and my heart 
Hereafter to the world’s heart shall be set 
And its own pain forget. 

Time gathers to my name,— 

Days dead are dark; the days to be, a flame 
Of wonder and of promise, and great cries 
Of travelling people reach us,—I must rise. 


But how shall a man rise to the height possible for him? 
Shall he do it by the strength of his own might and 


will? 


Was I not man? Could I not rise alone 
Above the shifting of the things that be, 
Rise to the crest of all the stars, and see 
The ways of all the world as from a throne? 


But he could not attain life in this way. He was a 
man of little vision. 


Great only in unconsecrated pride. 
« X* * * 4 
So I forgot my God, and I forgot 
The holy sweet communion of men. 
And ever to myself I lied, 
Saying, “Apart from all men thus I go 
To know the things that they may never know.” 


Then a great change befell. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 251 


From arrogant thoughts of self, the soul turns to the 
study of human life. If we cannot know God, we can 
know our fellow-men. The present may be only a little 
span of life, but shall we not find the secret here? But 
he finds the little span of life blackened with the wing 
of perilous evil, bateless misery. 


Where many a ruined grace 
And many a friendless care 
Ran to and fro in sorrowful unrest. 


Again the soul confesses its failure. 


O fool, O only great 

In pride unhallowed, O most blind of heart! 
Confusion but more dark confusion bred, 

Grief nurtured grief. I cried aloud and said, 
‘Through trackless ways the soul of man is hurled, 
No sign upon the forehead of the skies, 

No beacon, and no chart, 

Are given to him, and the inscrutable world 

But mocks his scars and fills his mouth with dust.’ 


And lies bore lies 
And lust bore lust, 
And the world was heavy with flowerless rods, 
And pride outran 
The strength of a man 
Who had set himself in the place of Gods. 


Then from the bitter shame of spirit, the soul turns in 
humble wise. 


And I beheld the fruitful earth, with store 
Of odorous treasure, full and golden grain, 
* * * * * 


252 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


And the great hills and solemn chanting seas 
And prodigal meadows, answering to the chime 
Of God’s good year. 


And the message of the earth was the same message that 
the second Isaiah gave to the faithless captives in 
Babylon, and that Jesus gave to the doubting disciples. 
And the certainty of God’s word in nature gave a new 
meaning to his word in human life, to all the struggle 
and confusion of the years. 


And then he heard a new music 


that compelled, 
Surrender of all tributary fears. 


O blessed voices, O compassionate hands, 
Calling and healing, O great-hearted brothers! 
I come to you. Ring out across the lands 
Your benediction, and I too will sing 

With you, and haply kindle in another’s 
Dark, desolate hour, the flame you stirred in me. 
O bountiful earth, in adoration meet 

I bow to you; O glory of years to be, 

I too will labor to your fashioning. 

Go down, go down, unweariable feet, 
Together we will march towards the ways 
Wherein the marshalled hosts of morning wait 
In sleepless watch, with banners wide unfurled 
Across the skies in ceremonial state, 

To greet the men who lived triumphant days, 
And stormed the secret beauty of the world. 


John Drinkwater gives us no slight, ephemeral beauty, 
but the abiding beauty of truth. And this is poetry, not 
some idle fancy of an hour, but life in its deepest 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 253 


meaning and noblest aspect. As long as men love and 
suffer and aspire, as long as there is search for truth 
and the craving for perfection, the poets will be the 
true prophets of the race. Not until “mankind is dead 
and the world cold,” to use the words of Bottomley in 
his “Atlantis,” “Poetry’s immortality will pass.” 

_ One name remains to be discussed and that the most 
positively spiritual and Christian of them all. Of course 
I mean Mr. Alfred Noyes. Whether his active life as 
writer and teacher and lecturer on both sides the sea 
will give him time and quiet to perfect his art and see 
life whole and see life clear remains to be seen. Poetry 
is a jealous goddess and demands singleness of her 
servants. Some affirm that our Mr. Lowell, our first 
man of letters as he is, had reached starrier heights 
save for his laborious years at Harvard and his later 
life as diplomat and man of the world. None of the 
younger English poets has written so much as Mr. 
Noyes, and if you compare his work with that of 
Tennyson at the same age, you will say that the younger 
man is not a whit inferior in fancy and feeling and 
skill, and that the range of his interests and subjects 
is far wider. Mr. Noyes illustrates the fact that a 
true poet in the modern world is not a recluse nor a 
dreamer, but an interpreter because a brother man. He 
is as human as Browning and with as red blood in his 
veins. He is what Kipling calls “a man in a world of 
men.” He rowed three years in the Oxford eight; 
he has a wholesome view of life; he is willing to face 
all the facts but with an undaunted optimism. 

He feels the beauty and hears the music of nature; 
every scene makes its impress upon him, and he gives 
it to its faintest touch; but nature has some concord 
with humanity, it is also a mirror of the soul. It is 


254 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


like a double rainbow, the lower arch distinct in form 
and color, and then above it, fainter and more wonder- 
ful, the bow of promise. This union of nature and 
man, of the natural and the spiritual, in a lesser poet 
might descend into flat and stale moralizing, but Mr. 
Noyes’ sincerity and naturalness and his true sense of 
beauty convey his message with artistic strength. You 
may open the volumes almost at random to find this 
truth shining from the page. I choose “Gorse,” one 
among many, for its color and life and its interpretive 
quality. 


Between my face and the warm blue sky 
The crisp white clouds go sailing by, 

And the only sound is the sound of your breathing, 
The song of a bird and the sea’s long sigh. 


Here, on the downs, as a tale re-told 
The sprays of the gorse are a-blaze with gold, 

As of old, on the sea-washed hills of my boyhood, 
Breathing the same sweet scent as of old. 


Under a ragged golden spray 
The great sea sparkles far away, 

Beautiful, bright, as my heart remembers 
Many a dazzle of waves in May. 


Long ago as I watched them shine 
Under the boughs of fir and pine, 

Here I watch them to-day and wonder, 
Here, with my love’s hand warm in mine. 


The soft wings pass that we used to chase, 
Dreams that I dreamed had left not a trace, 

The same, the same, with the bars of crimson 
The green-veined white, with its floating grace, 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 255 


The same to the least bright fleck on their wings! 
And I close my eyes, and a lost bird sings, 

And a far sea sighs, and the old sweet fragrance 
Wraps me round with the dear dead springs, 


Wraps me round with the springs to be 
When lovers that think not of you or me 

Laugh, but our eyes will be closed in darkness, 
Closed to the sky and the gorse and the sea, 


And the same great glory of ragged gold 
Once more, once more, as a tale re-told 
Shall whisper their hearts with the same sweet fra- 
grance 
And their warm hands cling, as of old, as of old. 


Dead and un-born, the same blue skies 
Cover us! Love, as I read your eyes, 

Do I not know whose love enfolds us, 
As we fold the past in our memories, 


Past, present, future, the old and the new? 

From the depths of the grave a cry breaks through 
And trembles, a sky-lark blind in the azure, 

The depths of the all-enfolding blue. 


O, resurrection of folded years 
Deep in our hearts, with your smiles and tears, 
Dead and un-born shall not He remember 
Who folds our cry in His heart, and hears. 
(Vol. II, p. 68.) 


Mr. Noyes does not stand for any single school of 
poetry. There is a touch of Keats and of Swinburne 
and even more of Tennyson. He is composite in the 
sense that he is a lover of all that is beautiful and true, 
a student of the great masters of his art, receiving from 
all of them, yet winning his way to his own message 


256 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


and manner, the waters of a hundred springs running 
clear and sparkling in his verse. He looks through 
faery casements at old romance, but he is not blinded 
to the romance of common life. He sings the ballads 
of ancient bravery and love, and he sees the heroic in 
the men and movements of his own day. He may lack 
the sturdy realism of Gibson, the optimism that dis- 
covers some element of manhood in the hardest lot, 
but he casts over all life the glamour of fancy and of 
love. He sings of the “Fisher Girl,” and the “Song of 
the Wooden-legged Fiddler,” and the “Barrel Organ,” 
the instrument of the poor, and gives them all music 
and light. 


There’s a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 
In the city as the sun sinks low; 
And the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it 
sweet 
And fulfilled it with the sun-set glow; 
And it pulses through the pleasures of the city and the 
pain 
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
light; 
And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again 
In the symphony that rules the day and night. 


Mr. Noyes has the spirit of Sir Henry Newbolt in 
glorifying the gallant deeds of his countrymen. From 
the rollicking song of “Forty Singing Seamen” to such 
noble tributes as “Drake” and “Nelson’s Year,” he in- 
terpreted the adventure and great deeds and mission of 
England. But he is sensitive to the heroic in common 
life and sings the victories of peace even more than 
war, and helps his countrymen to appreciate the men of 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 257 


thought and duty and creative beauty that have helped 
to make the greatness of the race. 


Who are the Empire-builders? They 
Whose desperate arrogance demands 
A self-reflecting power to sway 

A hundred little self-less lands? 


Lord God of battles, ere we bow 
To these and to their soulless lust, 
Let fall Thy thunders on us now 
And strike us equal to the dust. 


It is impossible, in a brief space, to give the true 
impression of the variety and richness of Mr. Noyes’ 
poetry. The spiritual purpose and light of it is my 
chief purpose. Many of the poems deal directly with 
religious questions, as “The Old Skeptic,” “Christ 
Crucified,” ‘““De Profundis,’ and “The Quest.” And 
where the themes are not distinctly religious, the thought 
rises as naturally to a higher theme as the mist into 
the upper air. 

Mr. Noyes looks at nature through spiritual eyes. To 
him it is an illumined manuscript of God. The popular 
modern doctrine that nature is non-moral cannot suit 
him. He never thinks of it as force or law, but a 
divine, beneficent life. He reads it as the symbol of 
eternity. 

But Mr. Noyes goes far beyond a natural theology. 
He has the distinctly Christian conception that this is 
God’s world, and that the meaning and purpose of 
human life are only understood in the person of Christ 
and his Cross. And here is the source of his optimism. 
The man who finds in nature the symbol of the eternal, 
who interprets life as the growing of a soul, its pain 


258 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


and struggle as the discipline for a higher life, does not 
regard Death as the dread enemy but the messenger of 
something better to come. The music and beauty, the 
joy and faith of Alfred Noyes are blended in the 
“Resurrection.” 


Once more I hear the everlasting sea 

Breathing beneath the mountain’s fragrant breast, 
Come unto Me, come unto Me, 

And I will give you rest. 


We have destroyed the Temple and in three days 
He hath rebuilt it—all things are made new: 

And hark what wild throats pour his praise 
Beneath the boundless blue. 


We plucked down all His altars, cried aloud 
And gashed ourselves for little gods of clay! 
Yon floating cloud was but a cloud, 
The May no more than May. 


We plucked down all His altars, left not one 

Save where, perchance (and ah, the joy was fleet), 
We laid our garlands in the sun 

At the white Sea-born’s feet. 


We plucked down all His altars, not to make 

The small praise greater, but the great praise less, 
We sealed all fountains where the soul could slake 

Its thirst and weariness. 


“Love” was too small, too human to be found 

In that transcendent source whence love was born: 
We talked of “forces”: heaven was crowned 

With philosophic thorn. 


“Your God is in your image,” we cried, but O, 
*Twas only man’s own deepest heart ye gave, 

Knowing that He transcended all ye know,,. 
While we—we dug His grave. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 259 


Denied Him even the crown on our own brow, 
E’en these poor symbols of His loftier reign, 
Levelled His Temple with the dust, and now 
He is risen, He is risen again, 
Risen, like this resurrection of the year, 
This grand ascension of the choral spring, 
Which those harp-crowned heavens bend to hear 
And meet upon the wing. 


“He is dead,” we cried, and even amid that gloom 
The wintry veil was rent! The new-born day 
Showed us the Angel seated in the tomb 
And the stone rolled away. 


It is the hour! We challenge heaven above 
Now, to deny our slight ephemeral breath 
Joy, anguish, and that everlasting love 
Which triumphs over death. 


In great imaginative interpretation of the forces of 
life, in musical movement that voices the heart’s noblest 
response to it, Alfred Noyes tells us that the noblest 
poetry is religious, that it makes the music that is help- 
ing to build the world. 

“Of all the materials for labor,” says Lord Dunsany, 
the Irish poet and playwright, “dreams are the hardest ; 
and the artificer in ideas is the chief of workers, who 
out of nothing will make a piece of work that may 
stop a child from crying or lead nations to higher 
things. For what is it to be a poet? It is to see ata 
glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its 
forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, 
to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one’s own, 
to know mankind as others know single men, to know 
Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a 
fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God.” 





GHAR THR UX iL 
The Poet and the Preacher 


as “eu Cat.) ¥ 
‘ ef at ay 


ip 


y 





CHAPTER XII 
THE POET AND THE PREACHER 


“Where are your American Poets?” was the question 
Lord Bryce asked of an American audience during the 
early days of the war, when he was in this country as 
the official representative of Great Britain. It seemed 
a strange question to some and they were rather con- 
fused by it and others were inclined to laugh. But it 
soon appeared that Mr. James Bryce was never more 
in earnest and penetrative, and for a day it became the 
topic of our chief editorials. Coming from a man rec- 
ognized by all to be so distinguished in letters and 
diplomacy, and a confirmed friend of America, it no 
doubt helped to lift our thought for a moment from the 
use and worship of things to the real values of life and 
the glory of a nation. Mr. Roosevelt in his many- 
sidedness and abounding vitality delighted in heralding 
a new poet as in discovering a new river. But this is 
not the attitude of our workers, our men of affairs or 
our men of State. Our workers are too eager to gain 
the earth, our scientists and public men too intent on 
fact for the quiet of the world of truth and beauty. 
Mr. Bryce could ask no more searching and revealing 
question: Do we see beyond our little spot of earth? 
Do we have imagination to realize the truths we know? 
Do we have aspirations for something better, sympathy 
for truth and heroism? These are the real treasures 

263 


264. THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


of life. The great men of our day are not all iron- 
masters, or multimillionaires, or politicians. The men 
who minister to the ideal side of life are our real 
benefactors. 


Blessings be with them—and eternal praise, 

Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares,— 

The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs 

Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays. 
(Wordsworth, 25th sonnet.) 


There would be more humanness in our work and we 
could make it a work of art if we saw and felt with 
the poets. We should have more men of light and 
leading, if the poets were better loved. 

But I speak to men who believe in spiritual realities, 
who deal with ideal themes and eternal hopes, and no 
men have greater need of the poets or can find in them 
greater riches of the Spirit. I speak of 


THE POET AND THE PREACHER 


I. The poet is first of all the realist. He sees the 
outer world of form and color and action, and the 
inner world of force and thought, of feeling and pur- 
pose. He sees more clearly and feels more profoundly 
because he is a poet. His mind is a sensitive plate on 
which the world of nature and the spirit records its 
faintest impress. And he is the true psychologist,— 
not by analysis and experiment but by imagination and 
feeling, by putting himself in the place of another, feel- 
ing with another, so interpreting a life hidden from the 
common eye and often from the person himself. And 
when the outer and inner world combine, as they do in 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 265 


our best poets, we have pictures of more than photo- 
graphic realism, and revelations of life that are con- 
vincing and cleansing. 

Wordsworth has this realism, of nature herself. He 
helps us to see, as some great artist does. To love his 
poetry is the finest training of the eye; from the daisy 
under the hedgerow to the frowning rocks of the Sim- 
plan, from the hare that runs races in her mirth to the 
woods decaying never to be decayed. We see the host 
of golden daffodils, and we have the inward eye which 
is the bliss of solitude. 

Tennyson makes no mistake in his birds or his stars, 
in some common life like the Northern Farmer, or some 
great historic character, like a Becket or Queen Mary. 
Is there a more vivid and condensed picture in poetry 
than his “Eagle”: 


He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 
Close to the sun in lonely lands, 

Ringed with the azure world he stands. 
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; 
He watches from his mountain walls, 
And like a thunder-bolt he falls. 


And “In Memoriam” has the psychology of sorrow that 
is revealing to the most thoughtful life. 

And Browning has almost Shakspere’s genius in 
holding the mirror up to nature, in showing man his 
very form and feature. “The Bishop Orders His 
Tomb” is the most realistic picture we have of the 
Renaissance, of its learning and its selfishness, its 
zesthetics and sensuality, its religiosity and its Pagan- 
ism; while “By the Fireside” in “James Lee’s Wife” as 
with a pen of fire lights up the way of two souls in 
their growing alienation. 


266 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


George Frederick Watts, the eminent English artist, 
painted a portrait of a well-known Englishwoman of 
society, and she was startled in seeing revelations of 
the inner life in the eyes, which she thought well hidden 
in her own heart. And a great poet is the artist of the 
soul, tracing the thought afar off, revealing the deeper 
and unknown self, the very secret of the life. 

It was the fearless realism of Charles Kingsley that 
opened the eyes of England to the shameless condition 
of the farm laborer. In his “Bad Squire” a poacher’s 
widow tells the story: | 


A laborer in Christian England, 

Where they cant of a Saviour’s name, 
And yet waste men’s lives like vermin’s 
For a few more brace of game. 


*K ** * * * 


We quarreled like brutes, and who wonders? 
What self-respect could we keep, 

Worse housed than your hacks and your pointers 
Worse fed than your hogs and your sheep? 


Our daughters with base-born babies 

Have wandered away in their shame; 

If your misses had slept, square, where they did, 
Your misses might do the same. 


It was big-hearted Tom Hood that made men see the 
blood on the clothes they wore, the unjust recompense 
of the poor: 


O men with sisters dear! 

O men with mothers and wives! 
It is not linen you’re wearing out, 
But human creatures’ lives! 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 267 


Stitch—stitch—stitch, 

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,— 
Sewing at once, with a double thread, 
A shroud as well as a shirt. 


It was the searching eye of Mrs. Browning that saw 
that the prosperity of England was being built on a 
child’s broken body, a fearful mortgage on the future. 


They look up with their pale and sunken faces, 
And their look is dread to see, 

For they mind you of their angels in high places, 
With eyes turned on Deity ;— 

“How long,” they say, “how long, O cruel nation, 

Will you stand, to move the world, on a child’s heart, 

Stifle down with a mailed heel its palpitation, 

And tread onward to your throne amid the mart? 

Our blood splashes upward, O gold-heaper, 
And your purple shows your path; 

But the child’s sob in the silence curses deeper 
Than the strong man in his wrath. 


It is said that Steel is King to-day, as Cotton was 
with our fathers. It is entering into the varied forms 
and uses of industry. It is helping to build the world 
to-day. But the world’s work is chiefly human, not 
coal and iron. And a poet like Mr. Carl Sandburg, who 
uses verse so freely that it is hard to distinguish between 
prose and verse,—gives us such an impressionist pic- 
ture of the whole industrial process, both material and 
human, that we feel the cost of so-called progress, and 
are resolved that it shall not make cheap the souls of 
men. 


A bar of steel—it is only 
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. 


268 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


A runner of fire ran in, ran out, ran somewhere else, 

And left—smoke and the blood of a man 

And the finished steel, chilled and blue. 

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again, 

And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel, 

A rudder under the sea, a steering gear in the sky; 

And always dark in the heart and through it, 

Smoke and the blood of a man. 

Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel 
with men. 


War may be a dire necessity, “to front a lie in arms 
and never yield” may be a test of manhood, and sacrifice 
the way of life. But when the earth is studded with 
ten million graves and helpless peoples are crushed 
under the wrecks of war: when the bars of the jungle 
have been let down and the beastly passions of the race 
still cry for blood, it is well for the new generation to 
face the terrible realism of Siegfried Sassoon, even 
repulsive in its honesty. 


The Bishop tells us: “When the boys come back 

They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought 

In a just cause: they lead the last attack 

On Antichrist; their comrades’ blood has bought 

New right to breed an honorable race. 

They have challenged death, and dared him face to face.” 
“We’re none of us the same!” the boys reply. 

“For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind; 
Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die; 
And Bert’s gone syphilitic; you’ll not find 

A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.” 


And the Bishop said: “The ways of God are strange.” 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 269 


If we who are prosperous only knew and could see 
so as to feel, what burdens and cripples millions of our 
fellow-men, so numbs or presses the soul out of them, 
so that they care no more for the great truths that are 
dear to us than for last year’s weather reports, we could 
not be satisfied with our personal religion and indif- 
ferent to the effort to apply the truths of our Gospel to 
social conditions. If we could visualize a generation 
of children, ill-fed, anemic, cripples at the threshold 
of life, peoples broken and scattered, bitter and hope- 
less, we could not as a nation be content with any God- 
like isolation, counting and hoarding our gains, but rec- 
ognize our kinship with mankind and govern our life 
by the law of good will to all nations. The same law 
governs life, national and individual. Selfishness is 
death. A generous service is life. 

The poets are interpreters of life, teach us to see 
things as they are, not to live in a dream or a lie, 
but to take our true place and do our true work in 
the great world of God and nature and human life. 

II. The poets are not only realists but idealists, 
not only interpreters of actual life, but of possible 
life, of those rare moments when the capacity of man 
awakes and shows its true nobility. This is the very 
nature of poetry. It deals in beauty, and beauty is 
not gross and bare but a form of perfection. It deals 
in music and that means harmony, all parts fitted to 
their place and work. It deals with life, with its 
finer aspects and higher motives, and even casts over 
the baser and more tragic aspects a light that renders 
them human and remedial. 

I know there is a view of poetry that casts away 
all the reserves of life, that throws open every side 
of life to the curious and morbid gaze of men, that 


270 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


mocks at all moral distinctions, that calls nothing 
sacred, nothing profane. It is the lower realism of a 
pagan revival, the celebration of “I myself,” a lawless 
self-creation, the glorification of all the parts and 
passions of man as equally to be used and enjoyed. 

It may be admitted that in freedom there is progress, 
that a youthful egotism is better than a slavish con- 
servatism, that the new poetry in its “detective spirit” 
adds to the understanding of life. 

But a lower realism may be a caricature of man. 
Impression, however vivid, may be only a half truth. 
You must crown realism with idealism if you are to 
have the whole truth of man. I lived as a young min- 
ister near to the scene of Masters’ “Spoon River An- 
thology.” It would be easy in my own town to be 
cynical over the weakness and foibles of men. But 
that would be sadly lacking the vision of life that 
Jesus had, who saw in the corrupt publican a poverty 
of spirit and hunger for a better life that made him 
a great disciple, and in a woman of the street a love 
and devotion that put her on the side of :the angels. 
We all have a Main Street in our town. There is a 
Main Street on Fifth Avenue as well as Gopher 
Prairie. But wherever there is a Main Street, there 
are hearts that feel for others, and acts of neighborly 
kindness done selflessly, and that connects the country 
town, however bare and common it may seem, with the 
city that has the golden streets. 

And it is the noblest office of poetry to help us to 
see this higher realism of life,—this man as he would 
like to be and can be. And poetry helps us to attain 
the ideal. Frederick W. Robertson could not get the 
workingmen of Brighton into his Church, but he could 
go to them as a brother man and speak in their labor 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 271 


unions. And what did he talk about as a Christian 
teacher? Why! nothing less impossible than Words- 
worth. He knew that if he could break through the 
crust of habit, lift their thoughts above the dull routine 
of toil, get them to think of beauty and heroism and 
sacrifice,—then he had found and awakened the soul. 
and they would understand and welcome his Gospel, 
the most wonderful ideal that has ever appeared to 
man. 

Take the most common fact of work to-day, the 
machine. We live in a machine age. The industrial 
technique is so highly developed that sometimes the 
machine seems to be all, and the man nothing. The 
machine stands for the complex and highly developed 
modern world. Shall it be like a blind fact that rules 
us and hurts us, or shall we see in it God’s forces and 
God’s laws, a servant for the welfare of the race? Let 
Kipling tell us in “McAndrew’s Hymn.” 


Romance! those first class passengers they like it very well, 

Printed an’ bound in little books; but why don’t poets tell? 

I’m sick of all their quirks an’ turns, the loves an’ doves 
they dream,— 

Lord! send a man like Bobbie Burns to sing the song o’ 
steam! 

To match wi’ Scotia’s noblest speech yon orchestra sublime 

Whaurto—uplifted like the Just—the tail-rods mark the 
time. 

The crank-throws give the double-bass; the feed-pump 
sobs an’ heaves, 

An’ now the main eccentrics start their quarrel on the 
sheaves: 

Her time—her own appointed time—the rocking link-head 
bides, 


272 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Till—hear that note ?—the rod’s return whings glimmerin’ 
through the guides. 

They’re all awa! True beat, full power, the clangin’ 
chorus goes 

Clear to the tunnel where they sit, my purrin’ dynamoes. 

Interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed, 

To work, Ye’ll note, at any tilt an’ every rate o’ speed. 

Fra skylight-lift to furnace-bars, backed, bolted, braced an’ 
stayed, 

An’ singin’ like the Mornin’ Stars for joy that they are 
made; 

While, out o’ touch o’ vanity, the sweatin’ thrust-block 
says: 

“Not unto us the praise, or man,—not unto us the praise!” 

Now, a’ together, hear them lift their lesson—theirs an’ 
mine: 

“Law, Orrder, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline !” 


It is easy to see in the multitudes of new peoples that 
have come to our shores, only aliens, the lowering of 
our standard of living and bringing us disturbing so- 
cial questions. We may regard them with bare realism 
as the disciples did the crowd coming out of Sychar, 
ignorant, superstitious, degraded; a bare and fruit- 
less field: you could expect no good thing from them. 
But Jesus saw with truer eyes: he saw the fields white 
for the harvest. Like the dull-eyed disciples men think 
only of the lower realism ;—they speak only of the 
Chinaman as a yellow peril or of the dead Indian as 
the only good Indian. They speak with scorn and 
contempt of the Jew who competes in business, of the 
Italian or Slav who bends his back under our burdens, 
who digs our sewers and lays our railroads and works 
our mines. The poets give us eyes to see better things, 
true life behind rough faces and in hard conditions. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 273 


They are Idealists and so interpret the real man. I 
know no better example of this fine idealism, facing 
the multitudes that strive and struggle here for a foot- 
ing, than the lines of Robert Haven Schauffler, him- 
self an example of old world strains and new world 
hopes,— 


GST Od Bd a Wa Be 


At the gate of the West I stand, 
On the isle where the nations throng. 
We call them “Scum o’ the Earth’: 


Stay, are we doing you wrong, 

Young fellow from Socrates’ land ?— 

You, like a Hermes so lissome and strong 

Fresh from the master Praxiteles’ hand? 

So you’re of Spartan birth? 

Descended, perhaps, from one of the band— 
Deathless in story and song— 

Who combed their long hair at Thermopylz’s pass? 
Ah, I forget the straits, alas! 

More tragic than theirs, more compassion-worth, 
That have doomed you to march in our “immigrant class” 
Where you’re nothing but “scum o’ the earth!” 


II 


You Pole with the child on your knee, 

What dower bring you to the land of the free? 
Hark! does she croon 

That sad little tune 

That Chopin once found on his Polish lea 

And mounted in gold for you and for me? 
Now a ragged young fiddler answers 

In wild Czech melody 

That Dvorak took whole from the dancers, 
And the heavy faces bloom 


274 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


In the wonderful Slavic way; 

The little, dull eyes, the brows a-gloom, 
Suddenly dawn like the day, 

While, watching these folk and their mystery, 
I forget that they’re nothing worth: 

That Bohemians, Slovaks, Croatians, 

And men of all Slavic nations 

Are “polacks”—and “scum o’ the earth.” 


IIl 


Genoese boy of the level brow, 

Lad of the lustrous, dreamy eyes 

Astare at Manhattan’s pinnacles now 

In the first, sweet shock of a hushed surprise; 
Within your far-rapt seer’s eyes 

I catch the glow of the wild surmise 

That played on the Santa Maria’s prow 

In that still gray dawn, 

Four centuries gone, 

When a world from the wave began to rise. 
Oh! it is hard to tell what high emprise 

In the goal that gleams 

When Italy’s dreams 

Spread wing and sweep into the skies. 

Cesar dreamed him a world ruled well; 

Dante dreamed Heaven out of Hell; 

Angelo brought us there to dwell; 

And you, are you of a different birth >— 
You’re only a “dago,’—and “scum o’ the earth.” 


IV 


Stay, are we doing you wrong 

Calling you “scum o’ the earth,” 

Man of the sorrow-bowed head, 

Of the features tender yet strong,— 

Man of the eyes full of wisdom and mystery 
Mingled with patience and dread? 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 


Have I not known you in history, 
Sorrow-bowed head? 

Were you the poet-king, worth 
Treasures of Ophir unpriced? 

Were you the prophet, perchance, whose art 
Foretold how the rabble would mock 
That shepherd of spirits, erelong, 

Who should carry the lambs on his heart 
And tenderly feed his flock ? 

Man, lift that sorrow-bowed head. 

Lo! ’tis the face of the Christ! 


The vision dies at its birth. 

You’re merely a butt for our mirth. 
You’re a “sheeny,” and therefore despised 
And rejected as “scum o’ the earth.” 


V 


Countrymen, bend and invoke 

Mercy for us blasphemers, 

For that we spat on these marvellous folk, 
Nations of darers and dreamers, 

Scions of singers and seers, 

Our peers, and more than our peers. 
“Rabble and refuse,” we name them 

And “scum o’ the earth,” to shame them. 
Mercy for us of the few, young years, 

Of the culture so callow and crude, 

Of the hands so grasping and rude, 

The lips so ready for sneers 

At the sons of our ancient more-than-peers. 
Mercy for us who dare despise 

Men in whose loin our Homer lies; 
Mothers of men who shall bring to us 
The glory of Titian, the grandeur of Huss; 
Children in whose frail arms shall rest 
Prophets and singers and saints of the West. 


275 


276 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Newcomers all from the eastern seas, 

Help us incarnate dreams like these. 

Forget, and forgive, that we did you wrong. 
Help us to father a nation, strong 

In the comradeship of an equal birth, 

In the wealth of the richest bloods of earth. 


III. Then the poet is the humanist. I need to call 
attention to the particular use of the word, not the 
technical use of salvation by culture, as against salva- 
tion by faith, the wisdom of the Greek world and the 
knowledge of the modern. I use the word humanist 
in the sense of the Latin poet, “I am a man and nothing 
of man is foreign to me.” And there is no other word 
to be used for this most significant aspect of the poet. 

Of course there are poets who are pets of the draw- 
ing-room and of the club, leaders of some exclusive 
cult, but that’s not the breath of true poetry, that 
blows as free, and universal as our wind over open 
fields, and through crowded spaces. 

All the great poets are universal in their sympathies. 
They can not build a lordly pleasure-house in which 
for aye to dwell. They teach the lesson of the lowly 
cot in the vale. They touch the truths that make men 
feel the unity of the race; they develop the spirit 
of true humanity. Dante, a Romanist, places men under 
one moral government rather than under the laws of 
the Church. Milton broke from his natural associa- 
tion of Church and Royalist to espouse the cause of 
man in the Puritan revolution. Byron and Shelley, 
born aristocrats, were not defenders of class and heredi- 
tary privilege, but made song the weapon of human 
rights. Cowper grasped the unity of human interests. 
Burns set the hearts of men throbbing with his 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 277 


It’s coming yet for a’ that, 
When man to man, the warld o’er 
Shall brothers be for a’ that. 


Moore, with pathetic sweetness, voices the sorrow and 
hope of an oppressed race in 


The harp that once through Tara’s halls. 


Wordsworth outwardly reacted from the hopes of his 
republican youth, but in his interest in common scenes 
and his intimate, loving portraiture of lowly men, he has 
been a vital force in the democratic movement. Tenny- 
son learned to feel with “men the workers, men my 
brothers.” While the second “Locksley Hall” has not 
the defiant challenge and hope of the first, the poet 
has not lost his sympathy or vision: 


Lame and old, and past his time, and passing now into the 
night; 

Yet I would the rising race were half as eager for the 
light. 


Kingsley and Hood plead the cause of the wronged 
and weary toilers. Browning reaches the climax of 
scorn in ““The Lost Leader.” 


Just for a handful of silver he left us, 

Just for a ribband to stick in his coat,— 

Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 
Lost all the others she lets us devote. 


His immortal plea for fidelity to the ideal. I heard 
Dr. John A. Hutton of Glasgow say that three- 
fourths of the New Testament was written to those 


278 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


who, if they had any sense of shame left, could not 
be disloyal to any high ideal. Poets have believed in 
the worth of the essential man, stripped of all the acci- 
dents of birth and circumstance, and they have be- 
lieved in the right of man for the chance to be himself 
and direct himself and have a voice in whatever con- 
cerned human welfare, and the poets have been the 
constant inspirers of this democratic ideal. 

Whatever is truly great in the poets is universal, and 
we feel in their verse “the touch of nature that makes 
the whole world kin.” Through this universal sym- 
pathy the poet is able to see good in men that differ 
from him, to condemn the wrong without raving at 
every evil doer of it, to “judge leniently because he can 
look upon faults as they appear to those who com- 
mitted them; judge justly, because he can regard the 
feeling with which he sympathizes from without,— 
realizing it, but not surrendering to it.” 


He who feels contempt 

For any living thing, hath faculties 

That he hath never used; and thought with him 
Is in its infancy. 


The poet is a humanist; he puts himself in the place 
of another, and so he feels the meaning of life, even 
where his reason questions its faith. A Matthew 
Arnold can see Messianic entrance into the sin and 
misery and squalor of East London and exclaim of a 
devoted minister: 


O human soul! as long as thou canst so 

Set up a mark of everlasting light, 

Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow, 

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam— 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 279 


Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night! 
Thou mak’st the heaven thou hop’st indeed thy home. 


The poet is the humanist, and he sees the stirring of 
the clod, the awakening of manhood in the dull mass, 
the age-old contest between darkness and light in the 
confused voices and doubtful struggles of human 
forces. Edward Markham sees a brother in the “Man 
with the Hoe,” and he asks the question: 


Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain? 
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave 
To have dominion over sea and land: 
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; 
To feel the passion of eternity? 

* * * * * 
O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
How will the future reckon with this man? 
How answer his brute question in that hour 
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world? 
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings, 
With those who shaped him to the thing he is, 
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God, 
After the silence of the centuries? 


The poet has such sympathy with men, he so be- 
lieves in the rights of men, that even in the radical 
assertion of these rights through extreme views and 
even revolutions, that cause the timid to tremble and 
the faithless to think that the foundations are destroyed, 
he sees the inevitable harvest of cruelty and oppres- 


280 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


sion,—the seed of a wider sowing of justice and liberty 
and brotherhood. 

All the younger poets are democratic in their sym- 
pathies, and many of them cry aloud in the passion of 
their faith. Even free verse is the expression of their 
plea that every fetter should be broken from the spirit 
of man. 

James Oppenheim declares that to enter the doors of 
souls in the hives of the tenement, ‘‘swirled in the human 
storms” is to “live five lives in the place of one.” 


That I may know, beyond grandeur of earth, 
O man, even here in the pitiful gloom 

Of these shattered walls, God’s grandeur sweeps, 
Yea, in a little room. 


And he affirms that 


We builders of cities and civilizations walled away from 
the sea and the sod 

Must reach, dream-led, for our revelations through one 
another-—as far as God. 

Through one another, through one another, no more the 
gleam on sea and land, 

But so close that we see the Brother, and understand, and 
understand ! 

Till, drawn in swept crowd closer, closer, we see the gleam 
in the human clod, 

And clerk and foreman, peddler and grocer are in one 
Family of God. 


IV. And finally, the poet is the prophet. The 
noblest poets have been conscious that they were not 
their own masters, that they were voices of a higher 
power than themselves. And critics are not so very 
wrong in sometimes seeing in great poems more than the 
poets themselves are conscious of writing. ‘Poet and 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 281 


Prophet differ greatly in our loose modern notions of 
them,” says Carlyle. “In some old languages the 
titles are synonymous. Vates means both prophet and 
poet; and indeed at all times, prophet and poet, well 
understood, have much kindred meaning. Fundament- 
ally, indeed, they are still the same; in this most im- 
portant respect especially, that they have penetrated 
both of them into the sacred mystery of the universe. 
Whoever may forget this divine mystery, as the realized 
thought of God, the vates, whether prophet or poet, 
has penetrated into it, is a man sent hither to make it 
more impressively known to us.” And Tennyson gives 
the poet his prophetic place: 


He saw through life and death, through good and ill, 
He saw through his own soul; 

The marvel of the Everlasting Will, 

An open scroll, 

Before him lay. 


The poet has been the foreteller of the race. And 
this power to see the future in the instant is not con- 
fined to the poet-prophets of the Bible. In this sense 
there have been prophetic voices among modern English 
poets. Years before Darwin or Wallace stated the 
theory of Development, which has so vitally affected 
every realm of thought and effort, the poets saw life 
as a whole, and through struggles and changes and 
growths, man as the crowning purpose of it all. Forty 
years before the “Origin of Species,” Shelley in his 
“Prometheus” had the dream of an unconscious uni- 
verse gradually informed with conscious life and love. 
The last act of Browning’s “Paracelsus’’ is a still clearer 
prophecy. It taught that 


282 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


God dwells in all, 
From life’s minute beginnings, up at last 
To man. 


But more wonderful still is the word of Tennyson, 
after years of question and reflection still the poetic 
interpretation of Development. 


Arise and fly 
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die. 


This light on the future is not given the poets by 
magic or special revelation, but through their sensitive- 
ness to the voices of God, their eyes alight to the mean- 
ing of life and the increasing purpose of its forces. 
They are forth-tellers far more than foretellers, the 
foregleam and foreword of progress, the energy of 
social and spiritual recreation. 

There is a materialistic and Godless evolution. If 
such long processes come to life in man’s being, if he 
is shaped into form by subtle and complex forces he 
so dimly understands, what chance of God’s thought 
of him and for the freedom of the Spirit? So thinkers 
may grow agnostic and the crowd become sensualists. 
But it is the poet that sees the deeper meaning and 
foretells the growing sacredness of life, and the finer 
sense of responsibility. 


A fire-mist and a planet,— 

A crystal and a cell,— 

A jelly-fish and a saurian, 

And caves where the cave-men dwell; 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 283 


Then a sense of law and beauty, 
And a face turned from the clod,— 
Some call it Evolution, 

And others call it God. 

* * * * * 
A picket frozen on duty,— 

A mother starved for her brood,— 
Socrates drinking the hemlock, 
And Jesus on the rood; 


And millions who, humble and nameless, 
The straight, hard pathway plod,— 
Some call it consecration, 
And others call it God. 
(“Each in his own Tongue,” Carruth. ) 


The industrial power of the world is regarded now 
as the means of all progress—and then—as a brute 
that “devours children’s souls and the hearts of 
women,” 


He takes them and he breaks them, but he gives them 
scanty thought. 


We bind tight the force of nature and we laugh ex- 
ultantly : 


Now behold, the good time comes for the weariest and the 
least ! 

We will use this lusty knave: 

No more need for men to slave; 

We may rise and look about us and have knowledge ere 
the grave. 


But the brute said in his breast, “Till the mills I grind 
have ceased, 
The riches shall be dust of dust, dry ashes be the feast! 


284 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


On the strong and cunning few 

Cynic favors I will strew; 

I will stuff their maw with overplus until their spirit dies; 

From the patient and the low 

I will take the joys they know; 

They shall hunger after vanities and still an-hungered go. 

Madness shall be on the people, ghastly jealousies arise; 

Brother’s blood shall cry on brother up the dead and 
empty skies.” 


Shall there be endless contest between those who 
have power and those who have only their hands and 
their brains? Shall our wealth be built on the tenement 
and sweat-shop and child labor? Shall our civilization 
forever drag at its chariot wheels the broken bodies and 
souls of men? 

The poet sees something better than the present 
strife and chaos. A new day shall come when the 
Brute shall be the servant, not the master of man. 


All the desert that he made 

He must treble bless with shade, 

In primal wastes set precious seed of rapture and of pain; 
x * * * 


He must give each man his portion, each his pride and 
worthy place; 

He must batter down the arrogant and lift the weary face, 

On each vile mouth set purity, on each low forehead grace. 


Then perhaps at the last day, 

They will whistle him away, 

Lay a hand upon his muzzle in the face of God, and say, 

“Honor, Lord, the thing we tamed! 

Let him not be scourged or blamed, 

Even through his wrath and fierceness was Thy fierce 
wroth world reclaimed! 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY — 285 


Honor, Thou, Thy servants’ servant; let Thy justice now 
be shown.” 
Then the Lord will heed their saying, and the Brute come 
to his own, 
’Twixt the Lion and the Eagle, by the armpost of the 
Throne. 
(Moody, “The Brute.” ) 


Is man a fighting animal and the dream of peace 
impossible because contrary to nature? The march of 
the race has been the march of armies, and the strong 
have risen over the prostrate forms of the weak. Shall 
it be so to the end of the story? Shall each nation seek 
its own and worship the God of national love, and 
forget the God of the whole earth? Shall we ignore 
the lesson of nature and history, of science and reli- 
gion, and deny the bonds that God has made, and call 
the vision of a new Internationalism of justice and co- 
operation and brotherhood too good to be true? The 
poets of all ages have seen the day afar off, they have 
greeted it from afar, they have lived in its light; from 
the Hebrew poets who sang of the city without walls, 
into which the nations should bring their glory, to the 
prophet of our own time who 


Dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, 
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that 


would be; 

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic 
sails, 

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly 
bales ; 


Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a 
ghastly dew 
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue; 


286 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Far along the world-wide whisper of the south wind rush- 
ing warm, 

With the standards of the peoples plunging through the 
thunder-storm; 

Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags 
were furl’d 

In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 


Every true poet to-day has this hope; he raises it a 
banner above the world’s din and dust, and calls all 
true-hearted to the conquest of Peace. 


Dreams are they? But ye cannot stay them, 
Or thrust the dawn back for one hour! 
Truth, Love, and Justice, if ye slay them, 
Return with more than earthly power: 
Strive, if ye will, to seal the fountains 
That send the Spring through leaf and spray: 
Drive back the sun from the Eastern mountains, 
Then—bid this mightier movement stay. 


It is the Dawn of Peace! The nations 

From East to West have heard a cry,— 
“Through all earth’s blood-red generations 

By hate and slaughter climbed thus high, 
Here—on this height—still to aspire, 

One only path remains untrod, 
One path of love and peace climbs higher! 

Make straight that highway for our God.” 

(Noyes, “The Dawn of Peace.”) 
The Poet— 


Presses on before the race, 

And sings out of a silent place. 

Like faint notes of a forest bird 
On heights afar that voice is heard; 
And the dim path he breaks to-day 
Will some time be a trodden way. 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY = 287 


We all need the poets to feed our spirits, to give us 
eyes and heart and purpose, and no man needs them so 
much as the preacher. Dr. James Stalker of Aberdeen 
declares that he knows all the best preachers of Scot- 
land and not one of them but is familiar with the nobler 
poets of the language. 

We need the poets that we may know life, not life 
in its ordinary, factual sense, but the secret of the heart 
and the forces that are moulding them. A great mod- 
ern psychologist reads fiction as the material that gives 
the keenest insight into the workings of life; and a 
great poet is the best interpreter for the preacher. He 
has the imagination that looks into the heart of things 
and the sympathy that makes the realism human and 
uplifting. A great poet searches an age to the depth 
of its consciousness and his interpretations are the very 
language of the age in the deepest things of the spirit. 

We need the poets that we may not lose faith in man 
or in our message. We must live on the ideal side if 
we are to be masters of truth and masters of human 
hearts. We must never sink into a low content for 
ourselves or for our fellows. We must never say, 


A flower is just a flower, no more. 

Man, bird, beast, are but beast, bird, man, 
Uncinct by dower of dyes 

Which when life’s day began 

Round each in glory ran. 


The Gospel is the greatest ideal of man, an impossible 
ideal, too great to be true, too good to be true to the 
worldly mind. A preacher who loses the ideal is a 
blind Samson shorn of his strength. “Why do men 
judge life by its low-water marks of depression,” said 


288 THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


the late David Swing to a young minister who was 
pessimistic over the social and religious conditions of 
their city. “If I lose faith in man one hour in twenty- 
four, in the twenty-three hours of faith I will do my 
work for man.” The poets can read the divine thought 
in the lowest life, and in the confusion of moral ques- 
tions, see where real right doth lie. And the fellow- 
ship with the poets is the cleansing and strengthening 
of the spiritual sight. 

We need the poets that we may have the human 
touch, be democratic in our sympathies, not live in an 
exclusive world of thought and feeling, but minister 
to the whole man and the largest man; that we may 
not bow before the idols of the market and the forum, 
but stand erect in our own manhood, and reverence and 
find the essential man, stripped of all the accidents of 
place and possession, and help him find and use his 
divine right. The poets by their humanness will help 
us be men in a world of men. 

We need the poets that we may live with a great 
hope before our eyes, that we be not chilled by the cold 
indifference of men or dismayed by their cynical pes- 
simism, that we may believe in the victory of the vica- 
rious life, that we may hold fast the promise, “Behold, 
I make all things new,” and though 


The new age stands as yet 
Half built against the sky, 
Open to every threat 

Of storms that clamor by, 


we shall labor on, heartened by the great shout of the 
finished work, “Grace, Grace, unto it.” 
“The smallest break in the eternal order and _ har- 


OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY 289 


mony,” says Mr. Alfred Noyes, “is an immeasurable 
vacuum of the kind that both art and science abhor; 
for if we admit it, the universe has no meaning. The 
poet demanding that not a worm shall be cloven in 
vain, or crying with Blake that a robin in a cage shakes 
heaven with anger, are at one with that profound truth, 
a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without our 
Father’s knowledge. The blades of the grass are all 
numbered. There is no break in the roll of that har- 
mony “whereto the worlds beat time,’ and it is because 
great art brings out, as a conductor with a wand, the 
harmonies hidden by the dust of daily affairs, that in 
poetry, as time goes on, our race will come to find an 
ever surer and surer stay.” 


I 


Ye that follow the vision 
Of the world’s weal afar, 
Have ye met with derision 
And the red laugh of war; 
Yet the thunder shall not hurt you, 
Nor the battle storms dismay; 
Though the sun in heaven desert you, 
“Love will find out the way.” 
* * * * * 


IV 


Your dreamers may dream it 
The shadow of a dream, 
Your sages may deem it 
A bubble on the stream; 

Yet our kingdom draweth nigher 
With each dawn and every day, 
Through the earthquake and the fire 

“Love will find out the way.” 


290 


THE SPIRITUAL MESSAGE 


Vv 


Love will find it, though the nations 
Rise up blind, as of old, 
And the new generations 
Wage their warfares of gold; 
Though they trample child and mother 
As red clay into the clay, 
Where brother wars with brother, 
“Love will find out the way.” 
(Song in “Drake,” Noyes. ) 











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